Sangha Is All
An embodied awareness community
Laura and Disability Justice
In 2014, the week before Thanksgiving unfolded in a typical fashion. I practiced yoga or lifted weights daily before my kids got out of bed in the morning; later, after we’d walked my kids to their school bus stop, the dog and I took a 40-minute walk. A self-employed single mother, I worked from home and after walking I got down to it, fitting laundry and caring for the dog’s needs in around the edges. When the kids got home from school, they did their homework in the kitchen while I started dinner, running back and forth to my “office” caring for unfinished details. After dinner and clean up, there was the normal round of shepherding the kids through their activities and social commitments. By the time 10pm came around, I had no trouble falling asleep. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I woke up lying on my back feeling like I hadn’t moved all night, experiencing a deep inertia; as I became more alert, I realized that my feet were missing. I could feel my head’s, back’s, torso’s, arms’ and legs’ contact with the mattress and bedding, but there was no sense of my feet. As many people who’ve been diagnosed with a chronic illness can affirm, a long and winding series of adventures and misadventures followed. I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a year later. Today, I’m still enmeshed with a long and winding series of adventures and misadventures. Aren’t you?
My path with chronic illness been different from that of someone who was non-normatively enabled from birth, and from any other person disabled by accident or medical diagnosis midstream. All our stories are unique. I’ve come to see that, while the content is influential and deserves care and attention, the way we practice with our experiences and the content of our stories is even more important. Some version of this was insight spouted to me by different people at different points along the way, but I had to find my own way into acceptance, love, and celebration of becoming someone I’d never hoped or planned to be. For me, that has meant learning how to redesign my life, my values, and my practices in ways that don’t simply allow me to co-exist alongside normatively enabled folks, but to fully occupy my self-worth in whatever spaces and communities I choose to engage with. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not proclaiming myself to be some sort of finished product of never-ending self-love. Occupying the worth of my non-normatively enabled bodymind in a normatively constructed world requires daily work, daily practice, and that’s why I’m here. This kind of work is both best conducted and desperately needed in community. In 2014, while I was practicing yoga and meditating, I had no concept I’d be starting my own embodied awareness community 11 years later. Misadventures notwithstanding, I am so glad to be here.