Yesterday, all stuffy with the second cold of this month (and we’re only halfway through it), and just an hour after I met with my somatic therapist from the comfort of my bed, I jumped on a live video with my husband. We were just a few rooms apart, and running our first experiment with bringing our private conversations public.
The intention was to do a public version of the private Office Hours we host within EMUNAH for our clients, students, and community members1, and we probably will still call them Office Hours, as we are both sitting in our offices for an hour, and like all of our Office Hours, we hope people will come in with questions and conversations that help us all grow together.2
And…it was really nice to just talk with Seth, publicly, about a lot of the things we reflect on privately all the time. Running a business, creating bodies of work, with someone you live with, parent with, fold laundry with, dance in the kitchen with, run errands with, is amazing for us because we work so well as a team. However, I’m realizing the richness of our inner world is perhaps one of our challenges when it comes to marketing our work. We understand it very well, and the people we speak to 1:1 in our lives (clients, friends, advisors) understand it, but we feel a lot of blocks around how to convey the deep value we’ve created in a broader way. And the high standards we have for ourselves are sometimes as much a liability as an asset, keeping us from just trying something, to start, imperfectly, and see how we can improve.
So yesterday we just decided to jump on a live call, publicly, inviting people in. Rewatching, I feel the familiar pang of discomfort and shame that I have often felt when looking back at something I did in public. Being perceived online is a strange thing, and though the substance of what we discuss is, the main point, the sensory inputs also matter.
I hear my voice, muddled by my stuffy nose and the absence of a more professional mic set up, I reflect on the fact that though I am comfortable not wearing makeup 99% of my life, I did put on some mascara later that day, and a part of me wishes I did for this, I see the clips that Substack automatically generates, and I see myself puffy and drowsy from being up most of the night with a sick toddler.
And. I love the conversation we had. It unlocked something for us both I think, and I’m eager to build on this.
Seth and I have a shared journal where we practice future-casting together. We write in the journal describing the future states we desire, written as present-tense.
Today is 11/11, a day that will always remind me of my beloved friend Ximena, who left this world far too early this summer after an incredibly powerful and moving journey walking with cancer for many years. Her wedding anniversary with her husband Tony was 11/11/11, and I have been honored to be involved in two beautiful anniversary celebrations for them over the years, and tonight we will bring her ashes to rest in the sacred waters where those celebrations took place, after 11 days of honoring her deeply in community since Dia De Muertos. I have felt her soft power with me deeply during this time
And in my journaling today, I felt her guiding my hand, futurecasting when we’d have done 11 of these live conversations, learning and growing through each one, and growing to a place where 11 people each day are drawn to the EDGE, transforming and reclaiming their relationship with their sexual energy, their life force energy, growing the field of coherence in this world through all the distortion we are living within.
Ximena was incredibly detail oriented, and as intensely aesthetically driven as she was wise, and perhaps it’s her presence that has me eager to steadily increase the production value and refinement of how we show up here, but it’s my own authentic voice that is happy to begin imperfectly, to just get started, to see what we learn, to let people know us, and to allow that to fuel our growth.
Community membership is also extended to paid substack subscribers to either of us, learn more about the different entry points to EMUNAH here.
In future we may or may not keep the focus on one of us vs the other, we’ll see what feels right!
