breathe with skin
...what happens when we allow our bodies to sense the land.
I have open appointments this month through July 26, for telehealth or in-person.
book using this link, reply to this message or reach out via email
learn more about my offerings here >
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upcoming *free* class :::
Natural Bathing Practices for Self-Healing & Wellness
Sat June 22, 10 - 11am PT, Virtual/Zoom
Ahhh, bath medicine. One of my very favorite remedies in the whole wide world. Humans across the globe and throughout time have always used bathing practices to cultivate health, embodiment, relaxation, social relationships and spiritual connection. In many places they are still an essential part of community self-care - the hamam of the Middle East, the banya of Russia, the Finnish sauna, Japanese onsen, the Korean jimjilbang, the ceremonial and health-giving sweat lodge traditions of native North America… and on. (tell me your favorites!)
Western US culture, so disembodied and hyper-cerebral, is a bit late to the party. There is no mainstream bathing tradition here, although right now in alternative circles cold-plunging is all the rage, promoted as a one-size-fits-all “biohack”.
In this class, I’ll share how to use bathing practices intelligently to suit your unique individual ecology, drawing from the principles of Chinese medicine, yoga and my own experience. I will share why Wim Hoffing is not good for all bodies, and how to use hydrotherapy intelligently to promote immune health, circulation and happiness. I’ll talk about steam baths; sauna therapy; cultivating different Qi through immersion in various wild waters; I’ll cover salt baths; hot springs; soaking, sweating and plunging according to your constitution; dry brushing, and why you might *not* want to shower every day! Come play in the water with me and find out what type of bath-healing is best for you.
P.S. last month’s class on herbal home care was amazing, thank you all for coming 🫰🏽🫰🏽🫰🏽 Part two TBA - there was way too much for one hour.
…part of my *free* Monthly Class Series on Rewilding our Health.
Empowering community to tap our birthright of natural healing in our day-to-day lives. I offer tools to gain confidence in caring for self and loved ones naturally. I share what I’ve learned over 20+ years of unearthing and remembering these ancient wild gifts.
all classes are on Zoom. Register to access the recording after the class. Up Next…
July: Women’s Medicine: Tending our Womb
August: Crash Course in Tongue Diagnosis
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Thursday yoga on the green :::
10-11am every Thursday @ Third Street green in Point Reyes Station CA
I am teaching a drop-in community yoga class every Thursday from 10-11am outside of Abalone Apothecary while the weather is fair. All are welcome, $15-$20 sliding scale, tell your friends. Bring your own mat or a blanket and a cushion if you need it to comfortably sit cross-legged on the earth.
The class is traditional Hatha yoga, designed to impart a daily home practice. Looks more like qi gong than vinyasa flow. All levels. No sign ups, just come!
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our skin will listen :::
Abalone Field Notes | 06.11.24
Last week I hit my limit. It had been a crazy-long streak of *doing*… a pattern I’ve written about here a time or two before. For a few weeks, my days off work were full of chauffeuring teenagers or cooking or cleaning or organizing or gardening or tending the snake 🐍. I actually enjoy all of those things. But when I skimp for too long on time alone in nature, my fuse gets shorter, my heart gets heavier, my mind scatters and my perception gets myopic AF. Until I finally take myself on a wild wander to work it all out with the land. (anyone else have this?)
So I set aside three hours (seriously that is all it took!) and went and got lost on the ridge trails in San Geronimo Valley where I live. It was a hot day, and inspired by a recent share by a friend and colleague, I wore minimal clothing in order to allow my body to more directly convene with the elements. I felt connected with a more wild vintage of humanity where we didn’t smother our skin under all this defensive material. When we didn’t hide from each other or the elements any more than was truly necessary.
Clothing, I realized as I walked, can be another form of separation.
I remember being little, like maybe 3 or 4 years old, and going to the Atlantic ocean with my family in the summer (thank you ♡ mom & dad). I can still feel the utter delight of running around completely naked through the sand and surf and tidal pools. I never remembered feeling ashamed, or scared of being exposed, or needing protection from the textures and temperatures of the land and air and water. I was blessed, and safe, and free. Then one year, my parents told me (very reasonably, given cultural norms and the public nature of the beach) that I was too old to run naked. I remember being confused and having this really deep and visceral sense of loss. I don’t remember tons of things from my childhood but I remember that - in fact, I remember resisting, trying to revolt and disobey.
Now, decades later, I’ve been so thoroughly socially conditioned & compulsively over-clothed that it was at first an edgy experience to wander the ridge last week with only the basic coverings that the law requires. It wasn’t that I was worried about how I appeared to others - I barely ever see people up on those trails. It was just a sense of uncertain strangeness. Normally, with leggings or a thin shirt over back & belly, I muffle this endlessly expansive organ of perception - the skin.
A teacher recently told me that we breathe through our skin.
It wasn’t long before my vulnerability turned to a deep and delicious sensitivity to the elements and the living land. I was fully available to let down my guard, extend my Qi field, broaden my senses, and gather all the invisible textures in the field through my pelt. I played with a three-dimensional energetic exchange, akin to echolocation, like we cultivate in the practice of medical qi gong - only with the whole body, not just the hands.
The directionality of the sense of our skin is infinite, with us in the center, like a human-shaped sun. Through the boundary of our physical form we gather and express radially in every direction, between our dan tien and the world, wherever we roam. A mastery of this must be how martial artists of ancient lore could know when someone crept up silently behind them.
In Chinese Medicine there is this concept of the “cou li” - the interstices, the tiny spaces between the outer material of our physical structure, sometimes translated as the pores of our skin. Always exchanging, opening or closing more or less, always emanating our essence and gathering from the field. Something different happens when we draw a breath in from the skin instead of the chest or belly. When we exhale from every pore. Our surface comes alive.
Moving first through a narrow deer trail laced with poison oak, I wove so so carefully to avoid the slightest brush with that beautiful trickster and protector of the forest. Still, I may have a dot or two of the oak rash as a memento. Over a few creek crossings, through coolness of air or ohso-slight softness of ground, I sensed the remaining hydration of the skin of the early-summer land. Moving under canopy of redwood, fir and live oak, cutting through a western heartsease patch I know, hair-faint grazes of usnea-wrapped branches and dry leaf litter hinted at, but did not reveal, why the violets were so scant this year. Immediately after the ennui of my depleted flower patch, I found myself slowing ever so slightly to luxuriate in the surprisingly heavier, softer air that hovered over the ground up to thigh level - where the dense large green foliage of angelica had thickened delightfully since seasons past. Scant violets, anbundant angelica, both water loving creatures… I logged the paradox in my limbs. And inhaled a last wilting wild azalea bloom, they were already finished, so long had it been since I had visited that friend of a trail.
Zagging up through open-skied manzanita fields and out onto a big fire road, I could *feel* the path. My skin was picking up new layers of messaging from the warmth, the breeze, the sun, as I went in and out of the canopy, as the earth radiated its long-wave solar heat back up from below. I met with all the plants I could not name, tucking a sprig of tiny-flowering heather-like evergreen into the strap of my tiny backpack. And wished I could drink freely from creeks and not even need to carry that.
My openness to the land was received. A few meters ahead I came across a big beautiful rust-and-black-toned grey fox. It was so healthy and had so much thick red fur that at first I thought it was a different species altogether. Instead of dashing off, it lingered, sensing me. I stayed present & centered, spoke softly, reached out with my skin. It watched me, relaxing its alert stance, and finally sat on the ground and started grooming itself. We were hanging out, sunbathing, doing our own thing together without having to talk, like old friends. It reminds me of the beginning of a book that I love, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, where he is living in some wild area of Bali and starts to be able to communicate with the land and animals. The ability gradually vanished when he returned back to the city. I believe we all have this capacity if we cultivate it. Tell me your stories of wild encounters, I would love to hear!
Layers of detail popped out to eye through sole, because my worn-down holey barefoot trail runners highlighted the subtle contours of the path. The tiny burst of white micro-star-flowers that hover on cat-whisker stems just above the glittering yellow mineral in the center of the trail. I remembered a teacher at Wintercount saying that with barefoot-style shoes you can see with your feet, so you can look up when you walk, and sense the periphery around you with your whole body upright. And yet I wanted more - my feet felt suffocated inside those synthetic slippers. A few days later I finally ordered the barefoot running sandals I’ve been eyeing for years - a tool of the ever evolving trade of inner tracking & embodiment.
My Earthrunners affiliate link is here if you want to simultaneously support my work and get in on the barefoot revolution.
And yes, of course, clothes protect us, and allow us to express ourselves, and exist for countless other purposes, and there are essential reasons for most of the time having an ideally soft, ideally natural fiber border-wall to keep us gathered and focused and distinct from our surrounds. I did cut my leg while running on the trail, and its ruby glint in the sun was beautiful and enlivening and it hurt. And my breastbone got sunburned, and these are all messages from the land. To be ever more delicate and precious about where to set foot; to return and expose too-much-indoors flesh bit by bit to sun, titrating a steady dose. To witness the body’s miraculous power of healing is always satisfying to me, and I still have a crescent scab across my lower spleen and kidney channels and now my burned rib-skin is peeling a bit, both reminding me sweetly of that feral roam.
May I carve out the time for another before too long, and may you also relish your own ways of sensing the wild with your radiant breathing skin.
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I really related to breathing though our skin with the land. I remember in my 20s hiking naked, except for hiking boots with my first husband on a camping trip in the Rockies, even on glaciers as the sun was so warm. We are way too bound by convention. I have always looked for homes with outdoor privacy so that at least in my yard I can be free.