What if when you are born and you take your first breath your mother disappears? What if you learn to associate breath with loss? I thought about this, about how I could teach myself to feel safe with deep breathing. 

It’s been a few weeks, but I had acupuncture again. I was there to support my digestive system, and the acupuncturist told me the most important point to address was Stomach 36.

Today I decided to go in the ocean instead of walking along it at a safe distance.

Adopted people, if they interpreted relinquishment as trauma, if their body/mind believes the mother gave them up because they weren’t good enough to keep, may well be fragile flames their entire lives.

I am a walking intestinal experiment.

If someone offered me a spoon, a fork, or a shovel to eat my meal, I’d take the shovel every time.

Dave said he thought the power to locate ourselves in the world might come from our gut microbiota, and the two men talked about how this could be true, and as someone who is starting to believe that my guts took a big hit and have never recovered since I was born and who is starting to think that Leaky Gut should be the follow-up book to The Primal Wound, I listened.

It’s not that hard to avoid writing for hours, days, years, your whole life. It's a heavy feeling, having not written when it's one of your dreams to have a book or a screenplay or a story or a poem. It feels like failure. Like a dark silence. 

Warning: this could make you feel euphoric.

When I focus on pleasing my Facebook community or even the world. I am looking in the wrong direction. My vision is pointed outwardly, when, truly, the greatest power I can imagine is inside. 

When you see what these men can do in what I think is less than a week’s time you start believing that, for you also, anything is possible.

Corie is the queen of showing up, of saying wonderful things, of making me feel that even though selling a book copy by copy can be demoralizing work, there are bright skies because people like her are in it. Not people like her. Her.