Category: Writing

EMBODIMENT

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

1.

I don’t want to be anywhere other than in this body right now. In every ache and tense muscle. In every uncomfortable step. In every fluid movement guided by a melody somebody was kind enough to create. I want to dance in ever expanding circles. Slow and sensual. Wild animal like. Unrestrained. Unlearning each day these strange restrictions we placed on physical movement. Unlearning inhibitions. Unlearning the last ties to shame for having a body at all.

What an incredible miracle to have this precious flesh to move around in. These beautiful bones linked to one another so precisely and with such care. The tenderness of tendons and ligaments holding everything in place just so. The sweet regeneration of cells. How much this body sustains and facilitates. How much this body loves me.

Thank you feet, thank you knees, thank you thighs and hips and belly, thank you vulva, thank you red organic organs, thank you heart, thank you arms and fingers, thank you spine, thank you neck and skull and brain, thank you skin and hair and nails, thank you nose and ears and eyes and tongue, thank you voice, thank you gravity, thank you space. I am none of these things. I am in lifelong relationship with all of these things. How do I care for this body as much as this body cares for me?

And see, then, how the notion of body expands, in wider and wider circles, to encompass all matter within and all around. I want to embrace embodiment with such enthusiasm I re-member myself as every living thing. And so, to live, completely.

2.

I am a self-facing performance
Looking in on an amalgamation of patterns
Singularity and multitude depending on the way the camera focuses

I want to meet you, but get caught in my own way sometimes
My arms reaching while my eyes look swiftly over your shoulder
I notice how often we hug each other (closeness)
And then upon moving out of the embrace we avoid each other’s gaze (distance)
But I want to look you in the eye as we separate
Maybe something about two bodies disentangling is too painful to acknowledge
The fundamental grief of humanness is that we cannot merge our-selves completely
(Oh, we try, we try, it’s nice, but
You come, and go
And I have to go to the bathroom)
I will never know you wholly
I can just revere your holiness

In solitude I deep-dive easily into metaphysical overview
It’s peaceful there and it’s resolved like God
Cradling the whole thing
Except
That work is already done
It’s already been completed

Now it’s about meeting
And being met
Now it’s how my human heart sets itself ablaze in the profound mystery of the Other
Reconciliation of difference
A balancing between physicality and Spirit
Presence and absence
Love and the false void of human suffering
(Real or not real; it matters very little in the realm of experience)

I am an open book with some pages still stuck together from bad weather over time
(Humid, cold fucking cellars and poor maintenance)
I will tell you my story and you may tell me your story
And I will close my eyes to see your life move like a picture reel in front of me
And this is how we tie our separated threads
Together

I Love You
It’s the bravest thing I have to offer
A steady safe plateau floating in a vast particle sky
A pliable Universe in every possible direction
Raise the sails, unanchor your plans
This – is going to be fun

One Hand Washes The Other

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

“One hand washes the other,” someone said to me years ago when I bought an old car from him for less than it was worth but all I could afford. It’s been a phrase I’ve thought about a lot. It’s sometimes distorted in superficiality: Quid pro quo. “We strike a deal that benefits us both”. But it always sounded much more profound to me than a smart arrangement to gain some profit. It sounded to me like a fundamental truth about life itself.

I am not anyone without the other. We witness and help each other grow. A collaborative effort. A co-operation. We are all elements of life unfolding. Of creation itself. And thus, we are interconnected.

In Buddhism this principle is also called “interdependent arising” – everything exists because of everything else. A giant web of InterBeing. Oneness.

I have been supported and guided and encouraged by others. I have teachers and mentors. I am alive and well only because of other people. The internal and external are intertwined like that. They cannot be separated.

“One hand washes the other.” With that phrase in mind I started working on a degree program in Integrative Counseling last year. What can I do to be of service? What is most needed in the world right now that I can offer?

I believe what is most needed in the human experience right now is conscious connection. To ourselves, each other, our planet, our purpose. As an Integrative Coach and Counselor in training, that is a process I can witness and support for other people. I can’t do the work for anyone; the journey towards connection to Self is a deeply personal one, but I can be present for it. As others were present for me when I needed that.

Ram Dass once said: “All you can do for another person is be an environment in which if they wanted to come up for air, they could”.

When I first read those words my heart started glowing; that is what pure love sounds like. It is also the essence of any form of counseling to me. A place to come up for air, to remember yourself, to allow for things to shift if they need to shift.

It is my ongoing responsibility to clear up my environment to be able to welcome others for a cup of oxygen if they so choose. Imagine if everyone would work towards that goal? What would our world look like? I joyfully uphold and unfold that vision into reality.

For more information about my work as an integrative coach check out the page on Clarity Sessions. If you have questions, feel free to reach out through this contact form.

Guesthouses

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

For 14 months I have slept in spare bedrooms and on couches, in hostels, in tents and on the occasional bus or balcony – relying on the hospitality of others, unable, still, to recreate what I lost, and establish a new home for myself. I know it seems strange to some people, but I also suppose most people don’t know what it feels like, so it doesn’t really matter what they think. I write this last sentence with relative ease now, but this understanding hasn’t come easy. We have to unlearn so much of our cultural and psychological programming to truly care less about other people’s judgements of us… I am still diligently working through it.

Since having been involuntarily uprooted and catapulted from one continent to another, I’ve struggled with a need for my own space, and I have wrestled with my dependency on others. It’s been a challenging time on many levels. But I have also felt a strong resistance at the thought of living in a new permanent residence by myself while pretending to be a well-adjusted independent single woman in her early thirties. As if I could lose home and hearth one minute and, without blinking an eye, feign having my shit together while painting the walls emerald green and millennial pink in some other house for me to occupy. As if it doesn’t hurt like hell. As if it hasn’t fucked me up. As if I am not still grieving a loss that extends from the material into the emotional and spiritual aspects of my being.

For years I had poured myself into the creation of a home-space and it got suddenly ripped away from me. My identity as a spouse, a stepmom, a homemaker, a caretaker of cats and plants, a maker of family meals, a collector of eclectic furniture; it all vanished one moment to the next. My hands left empty, entirely unsure of who exactly to BE now. To truly learn the lessons from this predicament, there was one message overruling all other sentiments in my mind and it sounded like this: STOP.

Stop. Stand still. Wait. Sit in this astounding agony. Be broken down for as long as it takes. Resist all external pressures towards “normalcy” – be wholly, repulsively, irritatingly, frustratingly “abnormal”. Not because you want to be recalcitrant, but because it is the healthiest thing you can do at the moment. However long it takes?

Yes. However long it takes.

The second message of equal weight has been ringing through the hallways of my heart repeatedly during this time: TRUST. Whatever this is, trust that it will bring you closer to yourself. Trust you are supported even in times of relentless turmoil. Trust the light will return. Trust your love and your vision and your intuition. Trust this path. You don’t have to know exactly where it leads.

And so I have been defying norms and convention, a full-grown adult, homeless, single and childless, without even a damned coffeemaker or vacuum cleaner or piece of furniture to call my own anymore. If life has a reset button, someone took a small pin to mine and relentlessly pressed it until the whole system was rebooted. Back at the factory settings. It’s confusing and torturous at times, yet when I look in the mirror I can look myself in the eye and say: “I Love you. I am so unbelievably proud of you, you sensitive, courageous spirit. You are doing so well with all of this”.

There’s a learning curve to losing everything. There’s a learning curve to accepting support. There’s a learning curve to living in proverbial guesthouses for a while. We are all guests, I guess. It’s just easy to forget when we crown ourselves rulers of our insulated Queen and Kingdoms of Domesticity. But do we truly own anything? The planet we get to live on? The bodies we move around in? These roofs, these couches, these cups of tea, these blankets? Take nothing for granted.

We are all reliant upon each other. We have just been taught that we can and ought to be in complete control of our own little private corners of reality, and that if we lose that control, we have somehow failed at life. We judge ourselves and feel the judgement of others. “I didn’t plan for this.” “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Turns out we don’t really have that much control, not as much as we think we do by a long shot. Control is a rigidity that feels like strength at first, until it reveals itself as a barrier to a life blossoming.

I am, for the time being, experiencing life as a transient guest in other people’s houses, relying on the goodwill of those around me, family, friends, hospitable strangers and hostel hosts. I am floating through a vast stretch of liminal space, which I presume I have to learn to soar through freely now. To live with something I can only describe as a fluidity of presence. To receive gifts, over and over. Receiving is a difficult task for many of us self-reliant, control-freakish, independent creatures of habit. But it’s a powerful exercise. To say “thank you” again and again and again, until all uncomfortable fear-based-pride is pulverized, THANK YOU.

I know deep in my heart, there will be a time I will occupy a home-space to call my own again, with a coffeemaker, millennial pink walls, and a bunch of amazing rugs. I know that I will open that space for others who are then where I am now. To pay it forward. To give what I have learned to receive. To support others on similar journeys. I find solace in that knowing. And I trust it will happen in exactly the right place and in exactly the right time.

Ode to Dancing

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

When I look around in the day to day bustle of human activity, I sometimes find myself marveling at how organized and ordered everything moves. But also. How limited. I think of my body, how privileged I am to be able to move all of these limbs so freely. And how I don’t do that enough.

One of my favorite activities in this world is going out dancing. For something I love as much as I love dancing, it’s surprising how little it actually happens. To be clear, this is not about dancing “well” or having some slick choreography, this is also not about the gaze of another. This is about feeeeeeeling the music. I love the deep melancholic techno beats, the psychedelic electronica, and the ancient rhythms from all over the world just the same. If there is any depth to the sound, it invites us to dive into it. And once you’re in it, once you have shed the inhibitions and boundaries of your strangely conditioned mind, you just feeeeeel it. It just moves in you and you in it. You become one with the music. At its best, dancing is an entirely sensual and spiritual experience.

While dancing, I have been asked this question by an interrupting stranger on several occasions: “What are you on?” And I have replied: “A glass of water”. It is pretty obvious that more and more people have come to this false conclusion that the liberating experience of dancing can only be achieved through the use of substances, with jittering jaws and horrible hangovers. I have seen so many people standing awkwardly on the sidelines until they were wasted enough to let go of their inhibiting self-sabotage and finally free to move their bodies.

Now, I am no stranger to that feeling of shame or shyness. But I am here to say that it’s a waste of life to feel bound by some elusive social contract that instructs you to constrain yourself lest you can blame some external additive for your wildness. It’s a total sham. If you have a body that is able to move in one way or another, the only thing standing in the way of the meditative ecstasy of dancing is your own mind. You don’t need anything to reach that state. You just need to silence that thinking brain, breathe, and feeeeeeel. There have been many times that my sober body was way more energetic and alive at 5 in the morning than all of the drugged up bodies running on empty around me. That’s because dancing actually generates energy, whereas synthetic substances drive you to peak and then drain your energy. For the record, I am not anti-drug in principle, I am just pro-vital-life-force-energy. And you have that running up and down your spine by default. It’s yours to use.

You see, the music wants to move you. It’s what she’s here for. And when you let her, when you relax your body, close your eyes, and allow the music to guide you into her gorgeous mysteries, you learn what freedom means, what pure joy feels like, and when the music is exceptionally good, you might even get glimpses of God.

On Meditating Through the Mess

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

I am living the cliché: The newly separated woman in her early 30’s seeking guidance from the realms of spirituality and psychology in order to make sense of the chaos that has become her life. You know, the woman who has just lost such large chunks of the identity she had eagerly been building for about 8 years of marriage and step-motherhood in a different country that she now – after being unceremoniously rejected by her partner – simply doesn’t know how to set one foot in front of the other. I have always been deep diving into philosophical quandaries and explorations of consciousness, so this is not new territory to me, it’s just all that’s left now. During this transition phase, I rapidly chartered the help of a Jungian psychologist; I regularly visit spiritual websites trying to find some solace for the godawful, heart wrenching pain I experience every single day; I visit stores that sell self-help books and chakra colored candles to inspire some kind of healing in this wreckage of a human heart. Needless to say: I’ve been having a really shitty time. As a diligent seeker of wellbeing I, of course, have been pointed to the power of meditation repeatedly by every single person who has had anything to say about helping oneself recover after such heartbreak.

Now, I am not an avid meditator. My biggest barrier during the slew of meditation and sound-healing classes that I have taken part in over the years has been my body. If I have to sit cross-legged, straight up, on a hard pillow for an hour, I get so distracted by the aching pain in my lower back that emptying the mind is virtually impossible. Yes, I hear you: Yoga, right? That’s what yoga is for, to train the body for meditation! Well, it is not trained for meditation, and it’ll take some years to fix that. So, in the meantime, I have been laying in bed with my headphones on, listening to a variety of YouTube’s guided-meditation-videos where the soothing voices of strangers lead me through imagined landscapes of lights and colors and energies, through the body and into the Universe. I don’t know if they help, but I can’t afford skepticism right now.

When my psychologist also implored me to meditate to clearly distinguish between my consciousness and the drama that unfolds around me in the shape of my life, I figured I should try to graduate from the kindergarten of mediation, to, well, let’s say 1st grade. (Not dissing the YouTube variety, I love everyone who invests time in making solid meditation videos – especially if they also manage to keep the notifications from their phones silent during the recordings!) So, I got the sage out that I had recently bought in one of those spiritual bookstores, I wrapped myself up in scarfs and blankets, and in the thick sage-smudge that filled my brother’s apartment, (which I reside in when he’s away because I am homeless – in the sense that I don’t have a home of my own anymore/as of yet) I closed my eyes and began to meditate.

Breathing in and breathing out slowly. Letting the thoughts arise as they may, and – without judgement – releasing them. After a couple of minutes of unhooking my mind from solid thoughts I marveled at the astounding variable density of thinking. As in; there are a lot of very obvious robust thoughts, but there also also very elusive thoughts that make themselves so thin and sheer that it almost seems as though they are not there. However, upon deepening your awareness, they sure are there, almost transparent, trying to have their moment! Sneaky bastards! There are bison thoughts, unapologetically barging in. There are mice thoughts, scurrying around in corners, difficult to catch. And there are chameleon thoughts, blending in with the backdrop of your mind so well you have to look very hard to recognize them. So, I sit there for a while clearing away these thoughts, and after some time of stillness I hear myself thinking: “This is going pretty well, I think I am not that bad at meditating” – and suddenly I begin laughing really hard.

I can’t stop laughing for a while and think: “Why the hell do you need to be good at meditating right away? Who is keeping score? What are you trying to prove?” Suddenly all these identities come rushing by, and this need to be “good”. I wanted to be the “good” daughter, never really rebelling, and always being home 10 minutes before curfew. I wanted to be the “good” student, even when basically impossible, I read all the assigned articles in graduate school – all of them – way, way, way too many of them. I wanted to be the “good” wife, making sure I had coffee and dinner ready for my partner exactly after he awoke, right before he had to leave for night shift, hoping to ease his stress, and hoping to connect with him in the unsustainable schedule we had involuntarily acquired. I wanted to be the “good” stepmom, so even when my stepson was pushing my buttons by arguing every single sentence that came out of my mouth relentlessly, I cleaned up his room so he could feel comfortable and at home. Fuck, I even wanted to be the “good” “other woman” to my husband’s ex by watching my stepson whenever she needed it during her scheduled days (nope, didn’t work!) And when I go to an institute for intuition and energy healing in yet another attempt to find some meaning in all of this mess, I get nervous, because what if I don’t have a “good enough” aura? Haha! What?!

As I am laughing at myself, I feel this surge of warmth rise up from my heart and I hear myself quietly whispering: “It’s OK, I already love you” – and tears start rolling down my face.

There is nothing wrong with acts of service, with care, with being responsible, and treating others with kindness and respect as much as possible. Those are wonderful qualities. But there is nothing to win there, there’s no approval to gain, no appreciation to distill from the hearts of others in an attempt to feel safe or accepted. The amount of love others are able to give is simply a reflection of the love they are able to give themselves. Therein lies our true work; to love ourselves. I am an amateur meditation practitioner who is probably going to fall asleep to another one of YouTube’s “guided meditations for empaths” or something along those lines. And each day, as a practice, I am going to love this sweet heart of mine so warmly that it will slowly heal, so that it will be able to meet others along the way with sincere love and kindness. And I will try a bit more “grown-up” meditation tomorrow, because, they keep saying it can lead to some real insights about yourself…

A Journey Begins and Ends and Begins Again

Yvet Youssef2 Comments

I have begun and deleted many blogs over time.

This one has my name on it. I sense that I have an ever-increasing and indisputable commitment to excavating my truest essence through writing and making art in general. I can’t think of a name more suitable for that journey than the one given to me at birth.

I have been writing and sharing photographs on an Instagram account with my name on it (@yvet_youssef) for a year now and I will continue to do so. It’s a space that I love and one that’s been exceptionally helpful to me. Now it’s time for this accompanying sister-space where I get to write beyond the caption limitation of Instagram, into the verbose blogosphere.

Thank you for visiting. It is my privilege to greet you here.