In these first three months of 2025, I’ve received more emails from you than in the past three years combined.
That’s a pretty striking uptick. Yet it’s not very surprising considering the magnitude of all we’re collectively going through--in the US and worldwide. All the stress naturally awakens our need to connect with one another.
Thanks for reaching out and sharing so openly. It’s an honor to be someone you turn to in these times.
And for those of you who haven’t reached out, I wonder what you’re up to, and how you’re feeling.
I know many of you are organizing, many are openly searching for ways to cope. Plenty of you are carrying on with your business and staying out of the fray. And likely most have been caught by some big emotional moments and maybe even some overwhelm with swirling thoughts and fight-or-flight.
And I’m reminding everyone, including neighbors, colleagues and friends who are feeling this same urgency: all the tempestuous, overcharged energy in the air--namely the fear, anger and grief--is not just understandable, but an appropriate response to the threats we face.
Many of us seem to be searching for ways to process all this stress and anxiety with less anguish and with more meaning. Like, "If we’re already enduring this chaos, can’t we at least put some of what we’re learning to good use?"
Obviously we need to do more than just wring our hands, and that’s what this post is about--what to do with this ongoing experience that is continually taking us to the brink.
TO GRASP, WRESTLE AND BIND
Right now, I’m especially interested in the parts of our communication and other forms of engagement that are highly instinctive and so second-nature that we hardly notice them. These second-nature habits are invaluable in crisis because they’re so familiar and ingrained, we can apply them effortlessly, without needing to think too much or learn anything new.
One such powerful yet often overlooked process I’m noticing over and over is grappling. Humans grapple when unsure about what to do. It’s not a novel undertaking, but I see it playing a vital role beyond just problem-solving.
Since I haven’t recently heard much intentional discussion of grappling, and a google keyword search didn’t offer much that was interesting, I’m writing about grappling today as a way to bring it to the foreground, so that we might become more conscious of it and use it more skillfully.
Grappling: To grasp with the hands; to wrestle. To bind closely. (Merriam-Webster)
Grappling isn’t overthinking or endlessly debating ourselves. It’s the process of actively confronting complexity--engaging with what is tangled, foggy or emotionally charged rather than avoiding or rushing to easy answers.
It's useful to examine the step by step process therapists use to guide clients through grappling with difficult issues. Here’s an example:
Acknowledging & naming the issue – Identify the struggle and the emotions tied to it; be honest and resist the impulse to ignore the issue.
Regulating the nervous system – Before diving deep into the stress, grounding techniques like breathing, movement or meditation help balance emotions.
Unpacking & exploring – Break the issue down, ask what’s really happening, what might be less evident and overlooked, explore what happens when the “script is flipped” and consider the issue from different angles; take notes.
Recognizing patterns & beliefs – Notice habitual thought and emotional patterns, as well as any trauma patterns, emotional triggers, ingrained beliefs and unconscious biases; this helps to reframe the view of the matter; take notes.
Engaging in meaning-making – Find lessons, personal values, bigger-picture perspectives and takeaways that help make the struggle a more transformative experience; take notes.
Testing & taking small steps – Grappling isn’t just internal--it requires experimenting with action, reflecting afterward, and adjusting the approach; maybe keep a journal devoted to this cycle.
Seeking support as needed – Grappling is most effective when done in connection with others who can offer insight and validation.
(This list is meant to inspire and does not need to be rigidly followed in order to grapple well.)
Nothing fosters courage like seeing courage mirrored in others; so keep reaching out, sharing your experience and grappling with your relationship to all that unfolds--alone and with others.
Grappling is good--maybe put these words on a t-shirt. Grappling together about our shared issues unties the knots that bind us to toxic systems.
THE CAUSE OF THE QUAKING
We are shaped by everything we experience, whether we acknowledge it or not. Grappling interrupts our habit of skating across the surface of our lives. It nudges us to acknowledge the cracks in the ice beneath our feet and to ask what’s causing the quaking below.
Grappling is hard, but denial is harder. Avoidance can become more exhausting than the troubles we’re trying to ignore.
Take grief--something I’ve had more than my share of. Grief didn’t disappear because I ignored it. It lingered and ached as it sunk deeper--often twisting itself into other things, like anger. I often felt a creeping loneliness, even among others. And every time I felt the grief welling up in my chest and throat, asking to be acknowledged or at least de-pressurized, I’d have to find a way to release the tension without actually facing the grief. At best, I had to work harder to find everyday contentment and solace, which complicated everything. At worst, the buried grief threatened my mental and physical wellbeing.
INTERNALLY WRESTLING AND EXCAVATING
Now I’d like to share some of my own journey with learning to grapple in ways that worked for me at different times in my life. One of the primary points here is that grappling isn’t absolutely confined to words.
As a young adult in the 1980s, yoga asana, an entirely non-verbal medium, enabled my first meaningful experiences of grappling. By consciously moving through a series of shapes, and feeling into my experience of each, I found a way to listen intimately and work through what words often obscured.
Talk therapy was also helpful, but at this younger age, words only took me so far. So much of my experience was non-verbal and went untouched and unexplored in talk therapy. Other times, words trapped me in my head, crowded my skull with chatty thoughts and blocked the flow of my process.
Beginning in 2016, my study of Somatic Experiencing expanded upon the embodied form of grappling that began with yoga asana. Somatic Experiencing is one of the most fruitful ways to uncover buried and complicated emotions because it is more open-ended and offers many tools designed to meet the moment--including, but not limited to, movement and words.
Just before the pandemic, I joined a group therapy circle led by someone I affectionately called the “Grappling Queen.” Each week, our group devoted time to grappling. A member would share an issue they were struggling with, while the others silently witnessed. Sometimes members would invite the others to speak up and join them in their grappling process.
I still get teary remembering the vulnerability and tenacity of our group. The surface of our work looked like a lot of yammering and confusion, but we were actually internally excavating--sifting through layers of memory and wrestling with raw emotion. All kinds of stuff would bubble up from the depths, like random words and phrases, flashes of images, entirely indescribable sensations and needless psychobabble. Occasionally, amongst all the muddy, rocky, buried junk, we found a gem--a forgotten piece of ourselves that was truly marvelous to behold. Most of what we uncovered wasn’t just dead and brittle, but very alive, often unwieldy, and sometimes even ferocious or dangerous after having been ignored for so long.
Our group work was full-bodied. We trembled, twitched, sweated, cried, guzzled water, burped, blew our noses and ran to the bathrooms. Some of us, myself included, had to stand up from our chairs and move around the room just to stay present in the work.
After each session, I was exhausted and proud. But I rarely mentioned this work outside the group. At the time, I attributed this shielding and secrecy to introversion, but eventually realized the process felt too intense and tender to translate to others, even to many of those closest to me.
Three more things about grappling:
It slows us down in the best way. When we feel compelled to rush our process--whether from fight-or-flight or a lifelong habit of avoidance--grappling anchors us without weighing us down; in fact, it unburdens the load we carry.
It uses all our best attributes--our mind, heart, creativity, gut instincts, acquired knowledge, lived experience and intuition--to help us make sense of the chaos.
Grappling is not a one-time event. It’s ongoing. And best done before and after taking action.
Notice when you grapple. Take care in your process. Help others do the same. We need to grapple as individuals, in groups and as countries.
All the madness flying in our face right now, and all the weight it’s placing on our shoulders might have many of us are feeling like we need to grapple in order to just keep going, but also that we don’t have the time and energy. Again, grappling unburdens us and simplifies our lives in addition to increasing our self-awareness.
Join me in embracing grappling as a sacred human art + a necessary medicine for these times. Reach out sometime and share your experience of grappling with me. Or, work with me...
LINKS:
ART - EXPLORATION
First of all, just watch people who have never heard of Radiohead listen to “Creep” for the first time — OMG!!
“This video of Yussef Dayes in Japan is truly incredible. It’s a hybrid live concert and mini doc of Dayes and his band moving throughout the jazz scene in Japan, playing sets, taking a Taiko drum lesson, learning about calligraphy and going to Zen temples. Between excursions, they play outside with Mount Fuji as their backdrop. The visuals plus the songs are a Xanax for stressed out nervous systems, especially “Chasing the Drum.” Drop to your knees holy fuck kinda moments - thank god the vibe is alive and well somewhere.” (This description by J Wortham in their newsletter Channeling made me click so fast and is a spot-on conveyance of how spectacular this video truly is.)
More music. You might be aware that the earliest forms of music sounded entirely different from our idea of music today? The earliest music also had a different purpose, which was shamanic and healing-based. We now know a lot more about WHY some kinds of music are more healing than others. Sound frequency means a lot. One of the most positively impacting sound frequencies occurs at 528 hertz. Here’s a whole playlist at that frequency. It’s not for *listening* and needs to be backgrounded...Put it on while working, relaxing or taking a walk. I’ve sent it out to a number of you during our conversations these last couple of months and decided it needs to go out to all of you. Enjoy.
Look at these beautiful, colorful hand-embroidered tapestries this young southern artist Tabitha Arnold makes. They depict the notable (and more frequent) historical and contemporary labor strikes, in a way that feels very timely but also reminiscent of 1930’s murals by Diego Riviera and others.
Tabitha Arnold, “These Hands” (2024), wool yarn on linen cloth “To me, the most generous thing an artist can do--regardless of medium--is to create a space, a kind of ego-less garden in which a visitor finds her own way." The legendary collage artist Jenny Odell on her work. Even if you don’t have time to read, scroll through and enjoy the many, many amazing images by this master.
I’m very moved by the person and artist Jesse Krimes. I hesitate to describe him or his art because this short film about him and his exhibition “Corrections” at the Met is everything you’d need to know. It’s on till July 13th. I’d love to see it.
This easy-to-digest post described as a “syllabus” has little nibbles of so many good things--story, reflection, poetry, prompts, land-based art and invitations to move to music. It’s called “Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!” and it’s lovely. Treat yourself.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
What ketamine does to the human brain. Atlantic Magazine (GIFT ARTICLE)
1st photos of 2 humpback whales mating, and FYI they’re both male.
INSPIRATION - SUPPORT
Have you been watching the bald eagle nest cam? The first hatch happened weeks ago!!! At the time of this writing, a third hatching is on it’s way or might’ve just happened? I check the feed every night at bedtime when they’re often asleep in the nest. Most recently, Jackie, Shadow and chicks have been dusted in snow, somehow still looking cozy and safe. The nest is about 145 feet up in a pine tree in the San Bernadino mountains in Southern California. Feed run by Friends of Big Bear 501c3.
In January 2025, Rebecca Solnit started a newsletter called Meditations in an Emergency and I thought, wow, this is what I’m sometimes trying to do in this newsletter, only in Solnit’s case it’s written by a legend.
Marketers followed consumers to social media and their phones. “Low Buy 2025” influencers are sharing tips for how to resist them. (NY Times GIFT ARTICLE)
What if your worry problem is actually a planning problem? Clinicians have long recognized the link between worry and planning. New research asks what this means for managing anxiety.
TOOLS - RESOURCES
The public library has an internet browser extension that allows you to see if your local library has any book you happen to be browsing online. Library Extension is easy to install and use. I love it. I’m doing audio books from the library now instead of Audible which belongs to Amazon.
Switch Lit is is a writing platform for collaborative storytelling. Here, two writers take turns crafting chapters of a single story and connect as equals in imagination across their own parallel world of fiction. What happens when one of the writers is you? Sign up is free!!
Things.in seems like a very cool way to plan a trip or just dream of one. Enter a city name to find out what that city’s all about. It’s more than the usual travel guide.
How to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to meta
I’m often asked about psychedelic therapy, which I’ve never explored and know little about. Here’s a 20 question quiz designed by a group of psychedelic therapists to help you determine your readiness by evaluating mental health stability, intentions, knowledge, support systems, and coping skills.
Your Life in Weeks is a free and easy-to-use website app that lets you design a map of your life in weekly increments. Each week is a little box. I haven’t started mine yet but it looks fun.
That’s it. As always, thanks for being here and for reading. Thanks for caring. And for slowing down and going deeper when you could just as well rush and skate across the surface of life.
And remember, if you’re interested in working with me in studio or remotely, reply to this email. You don’t have to say much more than you’re interested in working with me. Cheers!
With Love, in Struggle,
Grapple Goddess! great links - that link to the app Your Life in Weeks is kinda cool but also scary in a final countdown kind of way...
This is a great post. I'v not taken the time to read the last few but will now go back. Thanks Tina! All the links seem like amazing tools and are something to look forward to...