To My Precious Body,

For weeks, I’ve been wanting to write you this letter. I knew you had been inviting me to see the cellulite on your thighs and the rolls of fat on your belly through loving eyes. I felt how it hurt you when I criticized myself for all those years of eating too much food and sugar.

Then last night my greatest teacher lit a fire under my pen. As she reached for another brownie at bedtime, I yelled at her.

That was it. It’s time to climb completely out of my cage of self hatred.

Remember when I was 14 and I tore off magazine covers featuring supermodels, and taped them to my bedroom wall? Paulina Porizkova, Helena Christensen, dozens of them. Cindy Crawford was my favorite. I was tall and brunette like her. I thought perhaps if I was just a bit thinner, I might be as pretty as her. After all, these women got tons of attention for how they looked. That meant they were totally worthy of love — right?

Years passed and I continued my path of overeating, especially sugar. Mint chip ice cream and rainbow-dyed marshmallow cereal offered a quick kick for my somber moods. When I felt lonely, the pleasure of one more piece of buttered toast gave my tongue and tummy company.

I spent most of my life overweight, trying many times to exercise and eat well enough to be slender or even just lean. Once I crashed on my bike and fractured your jaw in three places, dropping from 162 lbs to 128, and boy did that get attention. People stared when I walked down the street. And the weight came back within months; I wasn’t done imprisoning myself through you.

Twenty years later, in January 2021, I reached the end of addiction’s tunnel with the diagnosis of a massive brain tumor.

You’d had enough. You’d reached your limits and were screaming at me. My neurosurgeon said, “We don’t know why the tumor is there. It could have been growing for 10 or 20 years.”

My precious body, you told me why it was there. We have our story. It’s ours and it’s what I go by.

I felt utterly hopeless in my dream of fully loving you. Would it ever work?

Surely a child would offer miracles. Children are the original gurus.

So when my daughter was born in 2013, I vowed to heal from addiction so I didn’t transfer my trauma to her. She’s nine now and has a healthy relationship with sugar. It’s balanced. She’s never been given sugar for her feelings. We talk about “strong body food” to help her be mindful. She eats cookies and ice cream with joy. Her body is lean. Her thighs and belly live without the guilt I grew up with.

She was seven when I told her all about my struggles with sugar. When my tumor was diagnosed, I shut the door on food addiction. Now 14 months later, although my body feels better than ever, there are still stains of guilt that creep to the surface sometimes.

A big stain surfaced last night.

It was bedtime. There was one brownie left and my daughter wanted it. At bedtime?! When she’d already had one before dinner? No, no… that’s just not the way we roll.

She asked me once. I answered, “No.”

She asked me again. Annoyed by her repeated request, I firmly told her, “I said, No.”

A third time, “Mama, but I really want another one…”

Out came my full-on tiger fangs. I looked at her and yelled, firm and fierce, “I told you No… three times, NO!”

Ouch. Dear body, the roar hurt my throat. And it battered my heart. I stood there in our kitchen, post-bath, wrapped in an orange towel, stunned.

My daughter is the last person I want to show my shadow. For her to be aware of my story, its pain and sorrow — that’s fine. But for her to be on the receiving end of my unresolved grief — that’s out of bounds.

She stood, frozen. Time stopped. And for the first time in her life, she simply stared at me. Seconds passed, her gaze stayed fixed on me and I couldn’t take my eyes from hers.

I watched as her eyes became pillows of tears, her face full of tender, swollen hurt.

Fear's ego in me was gone. I had fucked up; I was being so human; here we are.

Being frozen in upset with the greatest Love of my life felt utterly potent. We held each other’s gaze until she could fully feel the hurt and I could witness the impact of my immature reaction.

“I am so sorry, my girl. That is not the way Mama wants to be with you.” We stayed, gazing, as I watched one tear at a time spill from her precious eyes. She simply let me look at her and she simply looked at me. We were together. And as crappy as it felt to have yelled at her like that, my dear body, you knew that this moment offered sacred intimacy.    

“Can Mama tell you why I yelled like that?”

She nodded, not ready to speak.

​My dear body, you spoke to me without words, drawing a picture of why I chose harsh tiger fangs over grace.

“How does Mama feel when you ask me something once, and I answer you, and then you ask again and again? Do I feel happy about that or do I get annoyed?”

She nodded. She knows.

“That’s the first reason I yelled. I was mad.”

Her eyes, still wet.

“And you know that Mama has struggled with sugar and that I don’t want you to to struggle with it, too. You know Mama got a brain tumor and how scary that was. I don’t want that much pain for you, my girl. I was scared when you asked for another brownie.”

She kept listening.

My heart was humbled, softened, loose. There was nowhere on Earth I would rather be. Surrender spoke.

“My lady, Mama wants to tell you something I haven’t told you yet. Is that OK?”

She nodded, her heart still softened, calm and yet awake.

“My sweet girl, even though Mama takes good care of my body now…”

I showed her my belly. “I still have more fat than my body wants. It sticks around because of all the years I didn’t eat well.”

I grabbed my belly’s biggest roll of fat to show her what I meant. Then I moved my bath towel to show her my thigh. “Do you know what cellulite is?”

She nodded, no.

“It’s these bumps on my thigh. It’s body fat. And Mama’s legs have it here because of all those years when I wasn’t my body’s best friend.”

We were calm and communed. The moment was still. She listened intently as I shared my story with her. Then we hugged and went about our ways.

An hour later, as I pulled out the vacuum from the hallway closet, I heard my daughter call to me from the bathroom. I walked in and found her standing at the sink with her head hung low.

“Mama?”

“Yes?” I responded.

She looked me straight in the eyes, her face ripe with a fresh pool of tears, and said, “I like your body just the way it is. I don’t want you to be thinner.”

Yes, I could have died happy right there.

In the presence of the innocent heart of a child, 46 years of self-loathing slid off the surface of my skin. Cellulite formed on my legs because I, as an innocent baby, and then a child, and into my teenage years and further, couldn’t find my way to freedom. With every chocolate chip cookie I ate and every judgmental thought I chose that followed, I kept thickening the walls of my own prison.

Perhaps some people don’t choose addiction to cope with their childhood trauma. Perhaps some people don’t create experiences of severe pain and near-death — whether consciously or subconsciously — in order to see more Light.

I admire people who listen to their bodies' subtle cues and don't need to wait for a scream. I’m not one of those people. Or at least, I wasn't until now.

For me, a path of gnarly physical rigor was painted in this Life. And now that I’ve unlocked my prison door and set myself free, I can see that you, dear body, have always been here for me. Impeccable in your communication, resiliently digesting and detoxing all the junk I stuffed you with all those years, surviving brain surgery and continuing to breathe.

Today I give thanks for deepened empathy. With a big scar on my skull and lots of dimples on my thighs, I extend my whole tender heart to my billions of human sisters and brothers who dance with addiction.

It has been fifteen months since my skull was sliced open and, nine hours later, the skin closed shut with 52 titanium staples. A massive benign brain tumor was removed and I was left with a voice inside my womb that’s whispered, all of the 463 days since then: 

Only… 
Now… 
Alive… 

I had heard it before. “Life is short.” Live fully now; it’s all we’ve got. Don’t hold off ’til tomorrow what you can do today. 

​Yet, for the first 46 years of my life, somehow those messages landed just partially — until brain surgery, when yellow streams of light flashed before me in the ICU and my pelvis was tattooed with their whispers. ​

The streams of light said, Jessica, if your life is really all about Love, then live it fully now. 

I got the memo. Decided, done, no question, above all else, I am Love’s servant. Why? Because I Am Love. Love is Who We Are. Literally. 

Walk up to a grocery market cash register? See Love in the cashier’s eyes. Reflect it back to them in yours. Pass a pregnant woman walking down the sidewalk? Adore her with your eyes’ praise. Get yelled at by your husband because he thinks you’re lazy and you’re doing things half-assed? Take a jog listening to heavy metal; let your anger move through your blood vessels and out with your sweat; see the innocent little boy still living inside of him, who was told by his father that he was unworthy of Love. Pull up to your favorite café on a bike? Greet the 90-year-old man with a reverent hello in a country that’s lost its marbles, tossing elders into the ditch of loneliness after 32,850 days of service and breath.

Yesterday in Texas, once again America saw slaughter. I cannot know the grief inside the mothers’ hearts whose babies lives were stolen. I pray to never know this pain myself. 

And yet again, there is a memo: You are having a human experience. Your body is mortal.

Covid reminds us of this. Cancer. Fatal car crashes. Suicide. Our bodies die. And yet somehow we walk around in a daze, encaged by our own pretending. We think we can wait one more day or one more year to tell someone we love them. For six weeks after brain surgery, there were dozens of people who flooded my living room with flowers and my phone with “I love you.” I was near death. Were they waiting until they almost lost me?

​So we wait. Until one day, our loved one is laying in the hospital, and at last we spill our tear drenched words upon their final breaths: I love you. 

Let’s.
Stop.
Waiting. ​

Only.
Now.
Alive.

Love is who we are, and one breath is all we’ve got. Will we wait until our head’s sliced open, or our child is murdered, or our mother’s on her death bed, to remember this?
The deepest canyons are carved inside the human heart. Grief coats our planet today around what happened yesterday in Uvalde, Texas. Here’s one of the best captures I’ve read about it, Tragedy in Uvalde by Marianne Williamson. 

Human being is a vivid, messy, despicably painful and gloriously beautiful thing. Choosing to live as the Love we are isn’t easy. Yet it’s simple. In her poem, “Wild Geese”, Mary Oliver reminds us, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Listen to her reading it, to support yourself in choosing Love today?

Look in the mirror. If you’re a woman, let it be YOU, too, who appears when you’re wowed with awe.

Just look at YOU… living and speaking your truth, an expression of Love with every chance you get. Woman, you are the essence of stunning beauty, ALIVE.
​
You matter big time.

Open your eyes wide.

Free yourself.

Own your power, your succulence, your freedom in this one precious Life.  

Dear women, if you could use a big burst of support to help you see the Love you ARE in the “mirror” of your own soul’s eyes, stay tuned as we launch our sacred, sensual RebirthHer ceremony on Saturday March 5th. Our free online version will be offered here at no cost to women worldwide, for International Women's Day. 

If it was up to us, there'd be no war. ​

Woman, you are held.  🙏🏽✨

One year ago today I had brain surgery and was gifted a near death experience (NDE) that has lit-up my Life inexplicably. Dear readers, I am thrilled to report it's been a stellar recovery. Every day offers tears of awe. 

Today I'm more convinced than ever: We are here to revel. Truly, the veil between Life and death of the body is thin. It could be "over" so fast. One day, it will be. So for now, LET'S LIVE IT UP! Reveling in the gift of breathing, laughing, crying, feeling, laying our noses in the bosom of spring roses, laying our eyes on the rainbows that dance on clouds and ponds. 

To fully accept that it is just as much a joy for the moon to kiss my shoulders as it is for me to praise her face and glow... to me, that is being alive. Feeling this connection, this state of being in-Love with nature, is like a dance that never stops!

How could I share this joy I feel in Rebirth with all of humanity? 

When I asked this question to my "higher self" the answer I got was: RebirthHer. Laying on a massage table, in autumn 2021, I saw a vision of a sacred ceremony I'd lead for women to give birth to ourselves. For the past six months, I've been feeding this vision and it's now just two weeks away. 

RebirthHer is a sacred ceremony for women who choose to co-create a world of Love over fear, held near San Francisco on March 5, 2022 in honor of International Women's Day. 

To make it happen, I'm raising $1,000 in February for ceremony materials. Please donate what you can! Any amount is appreciated. Those giving $100 or more will be offered a 45-minute Rebirth-themed coaching session with me in exchange for your contribution. Thank you!

Dear Mother Earth, 

Your body is rivetingly beautiful. 

So many places on your lap and shoulders, lakes and canyons caress our human limbs and nearly blind us with awe. 🌙✨

What a gift it is to play and swim, climb and sing along the curves of your majestic body! 

We share a friend. Andrea and I met when we were 14. You live near her now, in the Tetons. She tells me you asked how my brain tumor got there. You and I have never physically met, just as I never met your sister whose brain tumor eventually led to her body's death. But my heart mourns your loss. I honor you as a woman and sister. So I'm here to answer your question. 

When my tumor was discovered through an MRI, the neurosurgeon assigned to my case told me, "It could have been growing for 10-20 years." 

I named her Fidela. Somehow, to me, she was my friend. As was Dr. Lewis Hou, whose Buddhist nature shone through his eyes and silently said, You can trust me to get that tumor out. 

So when he offered the options: 1) We can do nothing. 2) Neurosurgery. 3) Chemo. 4) Radiation... My response to him was, "Let's go in. Let's get it out." Though Fidela was my friend, she wasn't meant to stay inside my brain. 

"We don't know why it's there," said Dr. Hou. 

That was fine. I didn't need him or western medicine to know. I knew why Fidela came.

Right or wrong don't belong in this place. My story isn't "right" -- it's simply mine. In 2006 I did a workshop called It's All Made Up. Its lesson landed. We make up the story, the why, the reasons things happen in our lives. While science is useful, continuously, it disproves itself. Factual, material "realities" are consistently rewired, reworked, rewoven. Just like the human brain. 

Fidela was my body's latest and most effective attempt to get my attention. It was a piercing cry, a roar, a terrorized plead, a prayer from a body who knew she was worthy of being held by loving arms.  

I had a lifelong addiction to sugar and food. As a baby, my big feelings were met sometimes with EQ's tender, loving arms and gentle words. Other times, I was given sugar -- with no blame or judgment of my parents or others who would pass me "a treat" to soothe my cries -- I was given toxic and highly addictive pain killers called sugar. 

I knew this was causing problems, like being overweight most of my Life, but I didn't know that by the time I was in my mid-40s, I would start to greet paralysis. ​

From the instant she was conceived, my body was my best friend. Sure I had others -- human and divine -- but my body was unshakably devoted. Never, ever flinching in her masterful communication. We humans are given this -- being in a body can be awkward or awful sometimes, yet we are always given masterful communication from it. Complaining is senseless. 

Starting in 2015, my body tried five years of monthly Pain Level 10 migraines, to get my attention. I thought she was just asking for exercise, acupuncture and healthy eating. And maybe, if I had chosen to commit to that path of complete self-care, Fidela would have shrunk and disappeared. 

But I wasn't ready then. 

So after five years, the migraines stopped. They weren't working. My body knew she needed to get louder. So she starting to take away the things I loved most. 

I could no longer write legibly. I couldn't throw frisbee well. Highly skilled with both writing and frisbee, two of the great joys of my Life were now evaporating. I was in preschool again. 

So on February 16th, Dr. Hou led a team of eight through a 9-hour anesthetized surgery to remove Fidela from my brain. She was benign, and when my head was closed up with 52 titanium staples, she was smaller than a grain of rice. 

My tumor came to teach me a lesson I've been studying since birth: I am made of Love. 

Bodies that cough excessively might be trying to tell us to stop smoking cigarettes. Being obese might be a signal toward play, greater ease and lightness. When we've forgotten that we're made of Love, our bodies won't cease in their attempts to help us remember.

It's true for all of us, yet we forget. I believe that's why we came into these bodies. Yes, Life's amazing. Yes, bodies offer galactic joy and dancing makes my heart soar. Still, we are an expression of consciousness that believes we're separate from the divine, when actually the opposite is true. We ARE made of Love. We are here to remember. 

I've personally never resonated with "Fuck Cancer." To me, the body conveys Love so pristinely -- whether horrifically painful and scary or not -- that I can't use violent words to greet mine. Or anyone's. ​Fidela represented sheer devotion to my remembrance that I am Love. Whether my body died on February 16th in surgery, or stayed alive, I am meant to remember. 

It's now 9 months into this 2nd Life, as I call it. Near death has given me Second Life Eyes. 

I again feel like a toddler as far as your sister. I don't know what to say. No words will suffice. I am so, so sorry for the pain of your loss. I trust you remember her daily and somehow, some way, are finding a path of seeing and feeling her presence outside the physical form. Human mortality is so very sad. We're being shown that, asked to accept our mortality so we can live each day more fully, through the Covid/human immune system pandemic. And even though there is a Big Lesson here.. .it's still got a shit-ton of sadness in it. There's no escape from this truth. We live on a sad planet, as my Reiki Master said, so... guess what? 

You live and play in one of the most breathtaking places on Mother Earth's lap. You're a friend of Andrea, one of the most playful souls I've ever met. In the 32 years I have known her, she has never failed to embody respect for her physical temple -- through what she eats, how she moves and the laughter she treats like church. 

I write to you today, dear Char, like this letter is a hug. Not just for you, but for your sister, for Andrea, for her daughter Piia and my daughter Helena. This is a letter for Womanhood -- to keep rising into the bliss and splendor of being in a body. While we're here, heck, let's make the most of it. 

Love,
Jessica
​(Andrea calls me Dork Dong because... she can SEE, and she's hilarious!) 

My goal is to raise $1,975 through GofundMe by the end of the day today, November 16th. Today marks nine months from  brain surgery and near death, and my launch goal honors that I was born on International Women's Day (March 8th) in International Women's Year (1975). Funds will cover some of my time launching this project. 

Ready for chills all over your body? Here's a 2.5-minute film on why this matter, from Bioneers' Everywoman's Leadership.

​And what does it look like when women own our power?

Today marks 92 days out of pain from severe sciatica. Most cases last 2-3 weeks; mine lasted 12. A mirror stands in front of me, now free from an embodiment of lightning in my rear left thigh just as long as I seemed to be imprisoned by it. Though the pain was horrific, the gifts offered by this trauma outweigh it 10,000-fold. Trauma presented a doorway to bliss I never knew existed. 

Succinct isn't my middle name. I write like flowers bloom. My heart writes for me. She is unlimited. She spills, she's wide, she's vast. Yet sometimes brief is worth a try. So here I go.

When it takes nine hours of heavy opiates to cut thunderous pain from your thigh, you are then gifted with patience while standing in a grocery store line. 

​Thank you, trauma. 

When your pain is on such hellfire you either ask for help 200 times a day or suffer more, you never hesitate to ask for help again -- and are gifted now, with eyes that see Love's constant motion via the act of giving and receiving. Giving and receiving. We were born to serve each other. 

​Thank you, trauma. 

When you wonder if dying would be better than feeling pain like this another day, and you breathe, and you breathe, reminded that all you can do is your best in this. moment. now... You've been given a heavy dose of Wake-Up! And on those days when you're stressed out or grumpy, afraid our planet is dying and our species is going extinct, well... then again you remember that while you might not be able to save the planet from sinking, you can still do your best in this moment now. Healing doesn't live in tomorrow. It lives now. 

Thank you, trauma... for endless invincible truths that offer freedom. 

All I can do, I now see, is choose Love over fear in one moment and then the next. Even if the limitless version of me -- the Oneness in which our truth resides -- is pain-free, I love being here in a body for now. I choose this Life, and Life chooses me. I am breathing. I have walked through trauma's doorway, holding hands with the divine. 

Thank you, trauma.

Today I choose to focus on where the glass is half-full, not half-empty. Brain surgery for a massive tumor followed two months later by severe chronic pain? OK. Well guess what? I've never been raped. I wasn't abused as a child. I've never been physically locked up or chained in enslavement. I have food to eat and a safe bed to sleep in. My daughter is alive and healthy. OK? 

Thank you, trauma. 

Empathy in me is oceans deep. For those of you who've experienced sciatica or other forms of striking pain, I wish you peace of mind and ease in body. One day I will finish Ten Steps to Heal Sciatica. For now, here's Step 1 out of 10 and Step 2 out of 10: Reduce Pain and Inflammation. 

Today I celebrate the gift of Life in a body, and the glorious gifts trauma has given me. How about you? What are you celebrating today?​

Cobblestone under our bike tires, we cross the old railroad tracks. We turn right over the drawbridge.

She was striking.

But why?

Sure, R-Evolution is massive. But it's simply a woman — her body, as she was born, natural.

In Sweden, where my husband is from, no big deal. Nudity is natural. But I was born and raised in America, where freedom sings a different song. Nudity is obscene. Women’s bodies are often treated as objects, as property — not our own.

Biking over the drawbridge, I wonder how I'm teaching my daughter to love, accept and honor her own body. 

Children deserve the best of us. No experience I’ve ever had has compared to the Oneness I felt when my daughter’s little body was in my womb. We were physically one — as with every mother and child. My daughter’s got me — I would do anything for her. Mothers can relate; our connection with our children is indescribable.

This is personal. This isn’t personal.

What is the power of Woman?

In that place where she’s different from Man, we can state the obvious: We carry and deliver new life.

When we fully behold the power of this — as women — GAME OVER.

This planet would look radically different overnight if women owned our power today. I won’t pretend to know what that would look like because the power of Spirit, dancing with the complex particles of the physical universe, is far more masterfully creative than human consciousness. But I can begin to dream…

There is enough food for everyone, and it’s all grown with reverence for Mother Earth’s body.

Water is clean. Children swim in healthy oceans, creeks and lakes.

No body is abused. Bruises on a child’s skin are from that time she fell on the trampoline.

Sexual interchanges are between adults, consensual — and when there is misunderstanding it is taken seriously, and soon thereafter, healed.   

World class support is readily available for every human soul. Our pain, our confusion and despair are soothed by someone skilled to see — to see who we really are — as that’s what Love sees in its mirror.

Rivers are free. Dams evaporate. We barely remember ever plugging-up the vivacious blood of our planetary body, drowning her canyon walls.

Humans accept that only Love heals. That when we hold others in our mind through blame, it is actually ourselves who we imprison.