On Orienting

A subtle practice of grounding

Sep 16, 2022

✨A few things✨

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Hi Dear Readers,

Something I’ve been working on lately is the practice of Orienting. My SE practitioner taught me this a few a weeks ago, and it has really helped me in times of stress and anxiety. Orienting works like this: you sit/stand comfortably in your current environment (ideally, the first time you do this, you are somewhere that you know you are safe) and begin to slowly look around the space you’re in. This is a great video about it.

In times of threat or danger, we can have “tunnel vision.” This may be helpful when actually under threat, but it’s not helpful when going about our every day. The practice of orienting is simple, but profound. It’s not for your brain—it’s for your body—to show it that it’s safe. You look around slowly and maybe even find something visually pleasurable to focus on for a brief moment. This gets you out of any tunnel vision that may have cropped up. This allows the soft animal of your body to relax and feel safe.

I would love to hear if you have heard of this practice before or if you have done it before. How did you feel? Did you like it?

I hope you enjoy this week’s curation station. I hope you’ve been enjoying the Letters to a Broken Heart series, too!

Love you. Mean it.
xL<3

Reading List 🔖

You Do Not Have To Be Good - Courtney Martin
Being good is checkmarks and expectations, shallow breathing and anxiety in the middle of the night. Liberation is dangerously fresh knowing and acting on it—wholeness, breaking free from broken systems and cultures, hearing and seeing other people with as little assumption as possible, feedback, shifting, laughing, learning, emerging, quieting down, delighting.

New Toolkit! Safety Planning and Intimate Partner Violence - Community Justice Exchange
What can concrete support for intimate partner violence survivors look like from a prison abolitionist perspective? What can it look like in practice to support survivors while being acutely aware of both the dangers of abuse and the overwhelming violence of the criminal legal system? Join us for a lively exploration of the concept of “abolitionist safety planning” from feminists and abolitionists, who will share their experiences, challenges, and lessons learned from supporting survivors in situations of active and ongoing violence.

9/11 Made It Easier For The Government To Target Black Activists - Reina Sultan
Quelling protest is a huge priority of the surveillance state. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from 2015 revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since the protests in Ferguson in 2014. According to the report by The Intercept, “the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful.”

On the Overlooked Eroticism of Mary Oliver - Jeanna Kadlec
With accessibility to the masses comes a certain desexualizing and less focus on her lesbianism. Of course, Oliver is a lesbian poet who rarely granted interviews, did not often discuss her personal life publicly, and didn’t write as much about love or relationships as her early contemporaries like Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde. Oliver’s sexuality—and the sexuality of her work—is easy to elide even when the conceit of bodies and desire is barely disguised within natural metaphor: On a cot by an open window / I lie like land used up, while spring unfolds (“No Voyage,” 1963) or I know someone who kisses the way / a flower opens, but more rapidly (“I Know Someone,” 2010).

What It’s Like to Lose Water in Jackson, Mississippi - Kaitlyn Greenidge
Mississippi is the Blackest state in the Union, with a population that is 37.8 percent African American. Jackson is no different; 82 percent of the city’s population is Black. The neglect of the city’s water supply is part of a much longer, older story of the state government’s abandonment of public works after the end of Jim Crow. After Brown v. Board of Education, white residents of Jackson fled rather than support integrated schools, and their tax dollars went with them. Jackson has a poverty rate of 24.5 percent, compared with the 11 percent national average. All of these things have led to a legacy of managed neglect that brought us to this current moment.

Librarianship 🌻

Solidarity is for Librarians: Lessons from Organizing

How Librarians Can Counter Lies from Book Banners

Books of Note 📚

Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution - Nona Willis Aronowitz (nonfiction)

The Fortunes of Jaded Women - Carolyn Huynh (fiction)

Blackwater - Jeannette Arroyo & Ren Graham (young adult)

Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution!: The Story of the Trans Women of Color Who Made LGBTQ+ History - Joy Ellison (children’s book)

Against Heaven: Poems - Kemi Alabi (poetry)

Log Off: Self-Help for the Extremely Online - Sammy Nickalls (self-help)

[If you order any of the books above or any listed on my Bookshop site, a percentage goes to local bookstores and I get a small commission. Thank you for not ordering from Amazon!]

Playlist 🎵

“The Fall” - Zola Jesus
”Look at Me” - Sylvan Esso
”WOW” - Tess Parks
”2007” - Miya Folick
”Missed (Demo)” - PJ Harvey

Mood Board 💓

Self-Care + Good Things ☕

Morning pages. Somatic Experiencing sessions. Nature. Personal revelations that I hope to write about publicly at some point. My nephew’s joy. Deep conditioning my hair (finally). Coffee, always. Cold, rainy days. Walks and talks with Mamma.