#128 Portals of Connection: Abagail Rose Clarke
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Michael Reiley: Today on the show, I'm in conversation with Abigail Rose Clarke, who is a somatic healer, writer, and creator of the Embodied Life Method. Her new book, returning Home To Our Bodies, Re-Imagining the relationship between our bodies and the world challenges the dominant narratives that treat our bodies as machines.
In this conversation, we explore embodiment as a political and spiritual practice. And how returning to the wisdom of the body can help us imagine and build a more just and interconnected future. All today on the Sounds of SAND Podcast presented by Science and Nonduality. I'm here with [00:01:00] Abigail Rose Clarke thanks for being here, Abigail.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Michael Reiley: Would you mind to just talk a bit about your path as an educator and writer and maybe leading into the genesis of this new book?
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. Gosh, it's so interesting to try and figure out where to begin with. What it meant to become a writer. It was, I joke that, my, all of my Barbies were authors and I would, pose them at little book talks. 'cause I've just always loved writing and loved the idea of writing a book, which meant that when I was approached by North Atlantic Books to write a book about some of what I was writing about online, namely the.
Somatic experience of whiteness, that it's not just a mental idea that this was back in 2016 when it was really we were, it was graced for the male in a newly intense way when Trump won the first time. And I was writing about that publicly, and Tim McKee for North Atlantic reached out to me to see if I would be interested in writing a book about it.
And partly because [00:02:00] I'd always wanted to be a writer. The idea was. Terrifying. I think people who have lived into a big dream can maybe relate to that. So Tim was wonderful. It's been wonderful working with North Atlantic and in the process of I. Developing the courage to actually take that step and write a book about these topics that mean so much to me.
We also, there was space to explore what really wanted to come through, and what I realized is I wanted to write a book that wasn't just about the political aspect of what it means to be alive, especially alive. I'm a white person, so navigating what it means to be dismantling and de deconstructing these ideas that were covertly taught to me. And then as I gained stability in my activism, I started to notice it more and more. But the sort of ground of the work took more form as I realized that I wanted to. I. Be more in contact with what was beautiful, not just with what was [00:03:00] so difficult and painful. And that meant to me exploring more of what I know as a somatic practitioner of the beauty of the body.
And therefore, I just, I don't think it's possible to be more and more alive in the body without recognizing that the world that mainstream culture teaches us is inner and just a. A storage house of resources is alive. And teaching us at every moment, the lessons aren't always pretty and the lessons aren't always easy because this is a world that has been damaged and is living through the same toxic systems that we are.
But we are alive, we are natural bodies alive in a natural world. So over, it took about six years from when Tim McKee first reached out to me to when the book was actually ready. And so the work, and that was, some years after I'd first been. Really grappling with this, but it was a slow and meandering path for sure.
Michael Reiley: It was an organic weaving of all the things that you've been working on. Not like [00:04:00] a, there's the model of architecture and gardening, I think, when it comes to any kind of creative process. And yours was, sounds like more on the gardening side.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Definitely, and that included, planting some things, realizing that they weren't planted in the right space, taking them out, wondering why some things I planted just couldn't seem to thrive. Figuring all that out. It was messy. And in hindsight, really all of it fed itself into what is still growing.
I've written one book, but I'm working on my next, and I'll keep on writing as. Long as I get to really. But yeah, it certainly wasn't, I didn't go into it with some sort of clear blueprint, like an architect saying, okay, I'm gonna put this here and put that there, and I have a clear vision what it's gonna look like before I finish.
Not at all. I didn't know what the book was gonna be like until I was deep in it. So yeah, it's definitely a growing thing.
Michael Reiley: One of the things I really love in the introduction is you talk about how there's no beginnings, and I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit as a [00:05:00] way to, because it's always difficult to find, like, how do we get into discussing interconnectedness?
Abagail Rose Claeke: It's true. It is true. Yeah. How do we start, how do we have a linear conversation about something that is inherently non-linear? So in the book, in the introduction, I'm using the, I'm planting a garden. It's interesting now 'cause we are, we're recording this and I'll, after we finish recording this, I'll go out into the garden and I'll be planting some things now.
'cause that's the season we're in planting a garden. We are, in some ways I. Going about a very linear process. We plant some things in the spring. We harvest them in the fall. This happens and that happens, but nothing we're actually doing in the garden is beginning in the springtime. The seeds that I'm planting have been.
Cultivated through at times thousands of years. The soil has been, it's the soil is the result of thousands of years and now has a solid 30 or 40 years of being a garden. Nothing is actually, you can't just say, okay, this is where it all starts. It's all [00:06:00] finding its way in this weaving lineage.
And then what comes next season will be influenced by what happens this season. So in writing the introduction to returning home to our bodies, I was exploring that idea that nothing ever really begins, but we have to begin somewhere. So how do we start talking about something like the body history culture, our bodies influence on culture, the culture's influence on our body.
All of these are really non-linear chicken and the egg kind of questions. But in naming it as a seed, a seed is this incredible. Bundle of potential. It's resilient. It's it's magic. I don't really have another word to say for say it. Then you plant it and it becomes this tender growth and you have to really carefully nourish it.
It can't be left to its own devices. Little by little that seed develops. Little by little the roots grow. There's more resilience. There's something bigger [00:07:00] and stronger that's available. So I also really enjoy thinking about. Any kind of intellectual idea and for as much as I talk about the body, I'm still including the mind.
So there's intellect involved, thoughts are like seeds. They need to go through that very tender, gentle beginning so that they can get their roots and really, dig into the soil and then ultimately transform the landscape that they're a part of. It's a way of marking a beginning within something that's really never actually beginning.
Michael Reiley: I love that framing of seeds is magical . You think about holding a seed in your hand, and it's like you're holding the potentiality of a forest in your hand.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. .
Or even just a single, if you take an acorn, a single oak, then how many acorns will that oak create over its lifetime? It really is. It boggles the mind. It's one of those thoughts that if you try and approach it logically, I think it quickly becomes impossible to [00:08:00] hold. If we actually try and I imagine how big the planet is.
We can conceptualize it to a certain degree, but if we really sit here and think of how tiny we are in comparison to just the planet and then how tiny we are in comparison to the whole of the cosmos that is even known, nevermind what's unknown and undiscovered, it really quickly becomes something that the mind can't grasp.
But then within the body, and this is why I love the poetry of weaving the body and ecology together. In the body. We have these examples of the impossibly impossible all the time. Even just the number of atoms, the number of cells that we have in our body are they're an unfathomable number. So I have proof that I'm impossible.
I have proof that I can hold the unfathomable in my actual. Hands, even when I just hold my actual literal hands, which then for me, [00:09:00] gives me more permission to think out into these seemingly impossible ideas. And not to make too much of a leap, but that also means for me, envisioning a future that at the moment feels impossible.
Especially at, we're recording this in the spring of 2025. Right now, a future that is generative. Where children are safe, where the water is honored and cleaned, where the air is honored and cleaned. These kinds of, that kind of a future can feel impossible. I don't know. My mind doesn't know how we're gonna get from where we are to where I hope we can arrive, but I am proof that impossible is possible because just being a living, breathing body, my mind can't really grasp it.
And there's so much that even, and that's not even just because I'm not a cellular biologist. Even when you talk to cellular biologists, I feel like the deeper people go into these sciences, the more they actually are grappling with what we can only call magic, because there's so much we don't [00:10:00] understand.
So here we are living and breathing in these impossible ways. It gives me more permission to lean into what feels like impossible hopes.
Michael Reiley: The direct experience of us as humans is an, as an organism, like you said, has a limit to it when you talk about, like you said, the vastness of the earth or we see a number, we'll see the number of how many cells we have in our bodies, but we can't really hold a number larger than, I don't even know, a hundred or a thousand.
Like we can visualize a thousand things, maybe 10,000. But a hundred thousand, it starts to get a little bit and you start getting in towards millions, billions, and trillions. And somehow we just gloss over those numbers as okay, yeah, sure. There's, however many trillion stars.
There's however many trillion cells, but really it's at the edge of our knowing. And that it that, that is like your point, pointing to that is magical.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah, I feel like there's, because of where we are politically, I feel like there's [00:11:00] been more of this kind of turning towards the difference between say a million and a billion. Because as we grapple with the ways that billionaires are, have seized control of things, it's important to note the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars.
And even still, like even with all of these ways that people talk about it, like if you laid a billion dollars out, it would go around the world four times. I still can't really get it right. I know it's immensely large. I know it's something, a trillion and then a trillion dollars. As we inch ourselves our way towards a world with trillionaires, I can't totally grasp it.
So that can feel that on inability to grasp, can feel frightening, honestly. And this sort of, bottomless pit that's pulling at all of us. So it's good to match it. I find in my own body and practice, it feels important to match it with an equal unknowing of how many cells I [00:12:00] have, of how many atoms are in just one of my eyes.
That kind of unknowing opens me up into the unknowing being awesome, right? Not just in the vernacular, slang way, but just that sort of awe inducing spaciousness that comes when. We experience the impossible as literal flesh and blood. I touch my hands and I'm touching something that my mind can't totally comprehend.
So it keeps me from falling into the of despair and then able to find some sort of awesomeness of hope.
Michael Reiley: I've never thought of that word awesome in that way, but it's like you're something that's awe inspiring, that's bigger than you, that's impossible to know. You're just taking some of that, just experiencing like a little slice, a little stream of the something that's awesome. The
Abagail Rose Claeke: And we also say [00:13:00] awful, right? So it is that sort of game of where are we allowing ourselves to be pulled towards the immensity of what there is to fear and despair over, or the immensity of what there is to dream into. It's not something I'm perfect at, but it's certainly something I'm trying to hold as a significant practice because the alternative is to get the sort of.
Current towards despair is so very strong, right?
Michael Reiley: Yeah, definitely. We've had a number of episodes on embodiment, let's say, in a spiritual context at SAND, but could you talk a bit why returning home to our bodies, especially now is like a radical political act? I.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. We say, especially now, and I do think that there is a certain, especially now to it, but I think that there, there's always just this, it's always been important. [00:14:00] And now we just have so much that pulls us away from ourselves. There's so much that pulls us away from that. Deep inner connection that can, that comes when we're at home in ourselves, which also means not just, it's not just me, it's not just Abigail finding peace in Abigail's little bubble.
It's. Me recognizing that my body is in a continual, inescapable, unconditional relationship with the entirety of the world through a force as primary as gravity. My bones are being shaped and formed by gravity. They've been shaped and formed by gravity since before I was born. They'll be shaped and formed by gravity, by the actual pull of the earth for the entirety of my life.
The air I breathe, the food I eat, the water I drink. The world around me is constantly engaging with me and I am engaging with it. So when I come home, when I return [00:15:00] home to my body, it's not just finding that sort of inner peace that gets marketed and sold in the wellness industry. It's finding that deep.
Belonging that comes when we feel into how intrinsic it is to us, that this isn't something that I have to go buy. I don't have to go to a retreat and buy this thing and get this thing. And I, yeah, I wrote a book, but you don't have to go get books and certain like accessories to do this.
This is intrinsic to us. This is something that is. Truly a birthright. And when they, one of the reasons that I, that it's such a incredible inescapable sense of belonging is one of the studies I read when I was writing the book was on how they've realized that gravity is necessary for the gestational progress.
Like a embryo won't develop an anti-gravity, it just can't, so gravity is necessary. It's not [00:16:00] even like this, oh, yeah. It's. It's a nice thing to have. It's truly central to us. This pull of the earth is central to us, so returning home to our own bodies, which means also returning home to that sense of belonging between body and earth.
It's. Antithetical to this lack of belonging, this grasping for connection, this body as object sort of framework that I know I was cultured into. It's about how, a bit more about how we are perceived than how we actually perceive the world. It's more about how others perceive us than how we perceive ourselves.
And then. We end up reaching for all of these sort of superficial forms of connection rather than finding that deep sense of belonging within that exists within our very bodies. Which doesn't mean that I just sit here on my little [00:17:00] mat, my little cushion, and go into myself, because as I was saying, to be home in our bodies means to be home in the whole of the world.
So it means widening out to hold more and more. Of what is really here, which includes incredible beauty and really gut wrenching pain. They honestly exist together in, in this time in the world. And so if we're saying like, especially now, I think, these portals of some sort of connection.
Our phones are giving us like just constant streams of how horrifying. Things are right. And and that can be, and like I was saying, that current of towards despair is so very strong in being truly home and feeling that true belonging between body and earth. And then also being able to explore all of the various different connections and sensations and [00:18:00] wisdom that the body carries now. Those portals of connection they're also their own form of magic. So now I can use it in a different way. I'm now being pulled into myself rather than away from myself. So consistently. And that feels to me like personally, like the only way that I can actually hold all of the, all of that, that there is to hold, to be an engaged and aware person and not be swept away by the pain of it all.
So I would say that is why it's important. At least for me. I don't know how I would be, I don't know how I'd be doing it if I didn't have this practice. I just, I honestly don't.
Michael Reiley: When I think about somatics at least the way it's been presented is that it's basically the internal body.
But you expand that in this model of interconnection that somatics include the trees and the oceans and the birds and the earth. [00:19:00] And could you talk a bit about that kind of expansive somatic model?
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah, that's a great question. It's really interesting to be. Teaching Somatics, writing a book about somatics, and having been doing this from before, somatics was a buzzword, and now deep into the era where somatics is very much a buzzword. I don't know what listeners' algorithms look like, but mine, being who I am.
It's just I feel like I'm just constantly being sold something. A somatic workout, somatic business coaching, somatic sex coaching, somatic relationship and dating advice. Somatic this, somatic that, and it's just what are we even talking about when we talk about somatic? I also feel like people limit somatics down often to the nervous system.
They're talking a lot about like how this somatic practice will regulate your nervous system. This is also the. The sort of inherent flattening of social media. For as much as I love its connectivity, I think it als we also have to just recognize that it tends to flatten [00:20:00] things out and make them into this sort of monoculture.
So when I talk about somatics, I'm looking at the root of the word soma. Meaning of the body, meaning of the whole body. And I think it can be helpful to compare that to a word like anatomy, which means quite literally to cut up into pieces, an toia means to cut up into pieces. So a somatic approach to the body is looking at the whole of the body, even as I use the science and study of anatomy to understand the whole of the body.
I'm. I'm looking at the thyroid, but I understand that it's not just the thyroid, it's also part of the whole endocrine system, but honestly, it's not even just part of the whole endocrine system, because the endocrine system inherently affects the whole of the body. for me, it has to go beyond that because why do we have so many issues?
We can look at this through the western view, which is looking at disease. Why do we have so many issues with the thyroid gland, as an example? We live in a [00:21:00] culture that through pollution, stress, et cetera. Is hard to have health within, so we're seeing an in an increase in autoimmune diseases. As an example, we're seeing an increase in things like Hashimoto's disease, where the thyroid is struggling to maintain the body in equilibrium and in health.
So I can't look at the body as its individual part. I could just study the thyroid. And there are scientists that do, and thank goodness that there are, but for me as a somatic practitioner, I'm not just interested in just the thyroid. I'm interested in the thyroid as part of the whole body. And I'm interested in the whole body as part of the whole world.
I can't understand. The part without looking at the whole, and so for me, somatics is a reminder that we're always turning towards the whole as a set point versus getting stuck into the parts and pieces of anatomical thinking. And I use that to describe. [00:22:00] The way we might think about almost anything, because I can look at, say, the climate crisis and I can look at it in an anatomical way where I'm just looking at rising sea levels, rising temperatures, looking at these individual parts and pieces.
But if I'm remembering a somatic worldview, then it's also important to recognize that there's environmental racism at play. That there's, there's legislature that actually has. Created what we're navigating. So we can't just say, okay, everyone has to recycle. We have to look at what the systems have put into place as part of the whole.
So a somatic worldview is going to look at the whole, an anatomical worldview. We'll look at the parts and pieces they need each other. I think. It's not to say that we don't need to look at the pieces, but we need to remember the whole as a set point. So it's a really different way than a lot of people are referring to somatics.
It does mean the body. It does mean that we're gonna breathe and feel and move in a, body-based way. But it's a bit more than [00:23:00] just that, right? And it's definitely more than just the nervous system because as awesome as the nervous system is, thank goodness we're not just a nervous system because.
Have you seen like those images where it's just the nervous system, like a dissected nervous system? It doesn't look very comfortable. It's not a body that I want to live in, so thank goodness we have more than just that, and that needs to be taken into the whole of the exploration, the whole of what it means to really be in a body.
Michael Reiley: [00:24:00] [00:25:00] [00:26:00] people talk about boundaries and really respecting your boundaries. And part of healing is identifying your own boundaries. And so is that part of what you're trying to the current, you're going against, let's say this this drive towards healthy boundaries?
Abagail Rose Claeke: I think so. Yeah. Because if you look at the wellness industry as a whole, which I'm a part of, so I'm critiquing from inside the house. But if you look at it as. A whole, then we're supposed to somehow have boundaries, but also stay open. But there's just this push, have an open heart, but have good boundaries.
And the good boundaries means almost akin to cancel culture, to, to use more vernacular. But for me the a beautiful example of what it means to have. Healthy boundaries, if we're gonna use the term, is what we're made of, which is this cell, which every living thing is made of, which is cells and cell [00:27:00] membranes.
Cell membranes are responsive and adaptable, and they're semi-permeable, meaning they adapt to the environment that they're in. They respond to changes as they come. They let some things in, they let some things out. So for me, a somatic experience. Of healthy boundaries. And I say that knowing that somatic experiencing is its own form of somatic.
So unfortunately when I say something like, that's an somatic experience, it sounds like I'm talking about that I'm not. When we have an experience of what it means to be in our bodies somatically, and we're looking to explore what it means to have healthy boundaries, as an example. We can look to our own cells.
We can feel our own skin as an example of what it means to have responsive, adaptable, and semi-permeable boundaries, rather than this idea that it has to be all or nothing that we have to like, put down this wall and say no, never again. That being [00:28:00] said, the body has examples of what it means to have a lot of distance.
What's in like the cells of the intestine and the cells of the heart. Should never touch. If they ever touch, if they ever get really close, there's a pretty significant problem. And within the whole of the body, the cell, and the intestines for all of their space, they don't hate each other. They don't, they're not wishing each other ill, they're actually working together in their own way to create the health of the whole.
So I think that can give us. A more expansive understanding of what it means to be in community together and what it means to have these boundaries that necessarily adapt and change. We don't need to think that it's this all or nothing approach, and then it gives us a way to be open. That doesn't mean just defenseless, borderless, open without any kind of protective, grounded [00:29:00] sheath.
The body has a, has skin, each cell has a membrane, a barrier, a semi-permeable, adaptive responsive barrier is essential for life. So that, to me, gives us this model to explore what it means to be in healthy, adaptive, responsive, changing relationships of any kind and. I'm proof that I, at least at the cellular level, I know how to do this.
So I'm feeling lost or confused about it. I can go into myself into that deep belonging with the body and move from there rather than trying to think through it with my mind and approach it just from intellect.
Michael Reiley: That, that's a great way to think about it, to, to think about the, those those gut and heart cells and. They're the same, but they, like you said, they don't necessarily want to mix.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah, exactly. And they are really similar cardiac muscle cells and smooth [00:30:00] muscle cells are different, but they have similarities. But yeah, they're not supposed to be together and that's, and that means that it's okay when we have, I think that this also helps us find ways to be in community, which is really tricky stuff.
And it's not as easy as it feels like it's gonna be from the outside looking in, then you get into it, and relationships are tricky. They're beautiful they're rich, they're awesome to use the word, and they carry some inherent trickiness to it. So how do we approach. The trickiness of being fickle, imperfect humans in relationship with fickle, imperfect humans without falling back into this binary model of all or nothing.
Good, bad wrong. That that again, our mainstream culture, which includes now because wellness culture and the wellness industry is so mainstream. The last I checked it was in the trillion. It was a trillion dollar industry. When something gets that mainstream, we [00:31:00] have to question how it's. Continuing the status quo rather than pushing against it. And so a lot of the wellness industry, if you peel back the layers, it continues that status quo of teacher versus student, the hierarchy of teacher and student. I have the answers you need to pay me to get them of right versus wrong.
These foods are good, these foods are bad, this practice is good, this practice is bad. All of these different sort of, categories rather than. Being in the mess of what it means to just be humans trying to figure this out. And that again, is where finding, returning home to our own bodies, to that own sense of groundedness, that own sense of, here I am on the earth.
My, my body belongs to earth, my body is earth. I'm thinking, talking, moving, breathing, earth at the core of me, made from minerals just like the rocks are. When I can go there, I have more. Capacity to be in relationship with pickle humans, including [00:32:00] myself. Rather than feeling like I need to categorize and divide.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And to feel into our own inner community. We have our own kind of competing emotional, internal family systems, talks about parts and.
Abagail Rose Claeke: yeah.
Michael Reiley: But even somatically, like you can feel into your gut, which can feel unsettled and icky, but then you can feel into your neck and maybe that feels okay.
And then you notice, oh, and my hands are cold. And so you have to reconcile all these different parts of yourself that are actually that the totality of who we are.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. I love that you brought in internal family systems. I'm not an expert in it, but one of my dear friends is, and thankfully, so I can always go to him when I'm grappling with something and it's so helpful to just recognize that, yeah, that there's this community of. Abigail's inside of me. And everyone else, there's a community of Michaels inside of you. And then, yeah, just like you're saying at any given moment, I'm experiencing a constellation of [00:33:00] emotions and physical sensations. It's really rare to just have one. I find it to be, the most common time to find just one overarching emotion is in that raw.
That raw acute grief, not the days and weeks after, but in that just like that initial moment for the most part, the rest of the time we're experiencing a lot of different experience, emotional and physical experiences, and not all of them are pleasant and not all of them ever will be. And another critique I have of the wellness industry, because of the way that it is formed and maintained by the status quo, is the ableism that gets built in.
So this idea that if you just breathe eat right, meditate, right sleep take your me supplements, do all your stuff that you'll somehow trick the trick nature into, not aging you, into not having a body that aches and deals with. Deals with things that bodies deal [00:34:00] with. Rather than recognizing that even when we're navigating something really difficult, like an autoimmune disease or cancer, which I don't want to dismiss in any way.
It's not that the body is against us, the body's not an adversary against us. The body's getting it wrong. The body's not. Infallible. The body gets things wrong sometimes. Even just allergies. It's spring, so it's allergy season. That's the body mistakenly thinking that oak tree pollen is a threat to my body, right?
So it's not that my body is never wrong about things, but it's not like my body is somehow turning against me and trying to, and I need, and I don't have to as then come in with my willpower and force my body to conform. And. Because I'm a constellation of experiences, both physical and emotional experiences have physical counterpoints, right?
Like fear is a, is like a tightening coldness [00:35:00] in my belly and love feels like an expansive warmth through my chest and arms. There's all these different physical. Counterparts to the, what we call emotions. So whatever emotion I'm experiencing, whatever sensation I'm experiencing, there's more than just that experience in my body.
And it can be really helpful to. Recognize that so that when I'm in some sort of pain or discomfort, I can remember that's not the only thing that's there to experience. I don't have to deny it. I also don't have to get pulled exclusively into it. I have range and breadth here. And that when I say things like, I don't know how I'd be doing this.
I don't know how I'd be living through these times without this practice. That's one of the things I mean is I don't know how I'd be navigating. All that there is to hold and process and grieve over without that practice of being able to hold more than just the singular experience.[00:36:00]
Michael Reiley: Yeah, and it seems like it's a dance that you learn with wisdom, when to zoom in and and feel into the specificity of the body, especially if that's new. For you. Like I know for me, I was very late, probably 35, before I was, I was working with a therapist and he said like, where is that emotion in your body?
And at first I was like, what? He's yeah, where do you feel that in your body? I'm like, feel it in my body. And it like took me, it just wasn't something I grew up with, or, learned from a young age. So it, it seems like there's a dance between that being able to actually pinpoint and identify the places, but to also do what you're talking about.
Zooming out and seeing things from the perspective of interconnectedness and deep time, we're just, we're just this dynamic organism involved in a complex evolutionary dance that's tumbling into the next generations. It's not just like you said, allergies.
Maybe I'm, that's, my allergies are just part of [00:37:00] a, an evolutionary cycle that's going through generation to generations that's working something out in what it means to be a human.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. I love how you put it and that also the way that you're describing that it carries so much humility with it, right? Where it's I can. Do what I can to soothe and move into comfort, right? We don't, this isn't al, this also isn't about just like accepting, okay, I have this thing and now I'm just gonna have to live with it, right?
Like we can approach healing from a place of trying to fix things, which the word fix means to fix into place and it. For me to say that we're trying to fix something means that I feel like I'm talking about a car or a washing machine, right? Or we can think of it as tending, right? I tend to my garden, and that includes weeding when necessary and sometimes tilling when necessary, and planting when necessary, and I can do that with my health, and it's never just done.
I [00:38:00] can do that, not even just with health. I can do that with my body and it's never done. It's a it's an engaged dance, like you were saying, where all I'm trying to do is notice patterns as best as I can. And recently I heard someone say that wisdom is just that no one knows what's gonna happen. So wisdom is just, having enough of a backlog of pattern recognition that we can, reasonably guess what might happen in the future.
To assume that we know takes us out of the humility necessary to really be in that dance and that engaged, honestly, there's a certain amount of playfulness to it, even when the playfulness feels out of reach because we're in pain or there's something that's just, really making it hard to be.
In these bodies alive in these bodies, but to be in this playful sense of humility about it and just be like, I don't know. I don't know, but I'm willing to try and explore, opens up so many potentials, whether that's in the [00:39:00] relationship I have with my own body, the relationship I have with the people I'm closest to, or the relationship I have with this unknown and often looming future that I feel like we're being catapulted into.
I don't know. There's a humility there that keeps some sense of possibility. Not in that naive Pollyanna way, but in a, let's stay aware, alert, and engaged way, right?
Michael Reiley: Several times in this conversation you've been let's say going against the idea of the body as a machine, which is it's in our language, like you said, to fix the body. And even we were talking about the wellness industry, we see that, with this idea of, 21 day challenges and life hacks and it's very mechanistic. So what are some techniques or ideas that you have around softening that language and getting back to a more natural framing of the body in terms of how we talk about it and think about it.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. Oh, that's [00:40:00] such a great question. I do explore this in the book a bit. The, for example, the difference between work and and effort is one. Work sounds like drudgery, but effort. Sounds like something, that I have to put myself into fixing versus tending. The word tend, it's related to the word tender.
So there's softness there. So if I'm tending my body that just has to me so much more potential, so much more love in it. I don't wanna hack my life, right? That sounds pretty violent. I don't wanna hack my life, but I am interested in learning ways to be. Just, in better relationship with my own changing body, right?
Language, I think it can feel superfluous and it can also feel, I think that there's a certain amount of tenderness around it because unfortunately within social justice movements, there can be this policing of language. [00:41:00] So if you talk about something the wrong way, there's this unwillingness, this rigidity to try and listen to what's underneath what you're trying, what you're actually trying to say.
And language is I'm a writer, I'm a poet. I love language, and it's inherently flawed. It's inherently limited in terms of describing sensation, describing the experience of being alive. Language just offers these little pin pricks, right? These little portals into the experience. But it's never gonna fully encapsulate the experience.
But I think that slowing ourselves down and really questioning, what am I saying when I say this? What am I saying when I say I need to fix my life? Or I need to work on myself rather than I need to? Rather than I want to. I desire to. Put some effort into this, tend to this in this sort of way.
What am I saying when I talk about my body as linear, like I have to stand up straight and, have this like willpower. What am I [00:42:00] saying when I think of myself as a, if I slow myself, and this is coming from a person who is an, who is admittedly had a lifelong obsession with the body.
And so I'm coming into it, with some time and experience behind me. I can remember like you, when I was, I remember when I was first reading the book Siddhartha By, by Herman Hessa, and I was just like, he says that suffering is what's happening. Like I don't feel anything, it was because I just couldn't like, obviously, I was like a truly depressed teenager, but I just couldn't feel it.
And so there's a certain, we have to recognize that part of this is just. Finding gentle ways in to a body that has been pushed aside. I think therefore I am. So I just try not to feel, so language is a way where we can slow it down and question, okay, what am I really trying to say here?
And then, what am I really trying to do here? Am I in a relationship with, an ecosystem like my body's not even just me, my [00:43:00] Bo, if you think about how many bacteria I have, can we even say what does it mean to really be human? Because I'm not even just animal cells, I'm also all these different bacteria cells.
So here I am in this ecosystem that answers to the name of Abigail. Right here I am in this consciousness that if we're talking about we mentioned internal family systems okay, here I am presenting to you as a woman in her forties, but I've also got this 4-year-old in there and I've also got this teenager in here.
And who knows when they're gonna come forward and say, Hey, actually talking right now. That's part of the game of it, of trying to figure out who's actually talking and who I'm actually talking to. So slowing it down and being in relationship with all of that, tending to all of that, rather than trying to be like the rigid, unyielding dictator saying, we're gonna eat this way and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna follow these routines, rather than having the discipline, which, you know, to make a disciple of [00:44:00] oneself.
To be an engaged conversation with the whole of me, which includes the whole of the world feels really different than the way that we commonly approach discipline, which is like I'm gonna stick to this rigid structure exclusively to try and fix and mold my body into this one particular shape and ideal.
Michael Reiley: Nice. Thank you. I love the way you. Let's say hold words as they come out. Like you'll say the word and look at it and then say, okay, what does this word actually mean? Let's see what's behind it? What is it? Is it a holographic portal? Maybe to some other meaning, like words just roll out of our mouth and we get numb to them and we don't take the time sometimes to savor them and question their meaning.
I appreciate you d doing that in this conversation and also in your book as well.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Thank you. Yeah, it's the blessing and the curse of being a poet and also in my high school. We were made to take Latin, and I remember our, it was a small, like a really [00:45:00] small private high school. Latin was a requirement. And I remember the teacher saying, you're gonna thank me later.
And I was like, I don't know about that. This is just, and I do, I really do thank her later. I'm like, okay, I this is actually really interesting to see where did, I think that's where my love of the history of words, like I just love looking up and seeing like what are, if we break this down.
What does it actually mean? One of my, two of my favorites that I'll share the word want, it's an old Norse word. Volter. It means to lack. So if I say that I want something, I, there's a certain glimmer of the spell there that's saying that I lack it. The word desire, d sattari is a Latin, it means to pull down from the stars.
So there's a movement there, there's a reaching there. I just find that so beautiful to even explore, what it is that we're actually saying when we say that we desire or want or long for something. A client years ago shared when we were [00:46:00] talking about that idea, she said that we belong to the future that we long for.
Her name was Mariela Rose, and I just loved. That idea that we reach into what we long for, we belong to it, and then we pull it back to ourselves rather than saying, I lack it. There's so much movement and poetry in that. And yeah, I do like to take words and see what's there in them.
Michael Reiley: What do you have to say about hope and how it's framed in today's discourse?
Abagail Rose Claeke: So I'm so glad you bring that up because, so when I was working on the book, I had the really great good fortune of getting to ask Adrian Marie Brown and Sonia Na Taylor about the process of writing. These are two women who, if you haven't checked them out, Adrian Marie Brown is quite well known for pleasure activism, emergent strategy.
So Maria Taylor wrote the Bodies on an apology. These are really incredible black feminist thinkers. And I asked them what. It's what [00:47:00] advice they would have about what it means to take your thinking and put it in a book, which means that now it's, to use the word, it's fixed there, right?
It's a snapshot of your thinking and that your thinking's gonna expand and change. And they were so helpful in just reminding me that's just what's happening is that you offer a snapshot of your thinking and then yeah you're alive. So you keep on thinking and your thoughts are gonna change, and you just have to trust that snapshot is going to have its own.
Value, and for the most part in everything I wrote in returning home to our bodies, writers will understand that. I'll sometimes look back and be like, oh, I wish I'd changed that word just a little bit, or I wish I'd added a comma right there. Something silly and small, but hope. As a concept is the thing that, it's been now, I finished writing the book over two years ago.
That is the thing that has changed the most for me from how I wrote about it in the book. I wrote about it in the book kind of thing. I didn't really wanna talk about hope that I [00:48:00] wanted to. I referred to that I was gonna talk about awe and curiosity. As hope's more grounded patient cousins. And I still do believe that.
I think that awe, curiosity and hope are definitely in the same family. But I was feeling a little resistant to the idea of hope in the way that I felt like it was so constantly pushed on us as a way to sidestep what was really in front of us. Things will be better someday. It's gonna get better someday.
Out here, over there. And there was this sort of disembodiment that I felt in when I. When I saw people engage with what felt like they were describing hope. Now, on the flip side of both, two years of my life, but also what's been really magical is that I toured pretty extensively with the book, especially in its first year.
So I got to have so many conversations and conversations like this one where we're actually, taking these ideas and looking at them, and I've been asked quite a lot. What do you mean about. Hope [00:49:00] and hope it can either take us out or it can really ground us in. So I think that, when hope is a discipline as Maria Kaba says, then it's an action that I'm taking and if I'm belonging to the future that I long for, as I said before, then. I have then if I'm hoping for that future and I take it as an action rather than just a sort of passive, it'll be better someday. It's gonna get better. Someday they'll fix it Someday. The great and mysterious they. But if instead, I remember that hope is an action, which means that any little way that I can make that future that I long for alive in the present, that's hope.
I'm living it into being, it doesn't have to be perfect. I can't fix, I can't make legislature that says that we can't be pouring, toxins into the air and water. [00:50:00] But I can, in any little way honor the air and the water in my own life as. As things as beings worth protecting, that's hope that has an action, an embodied action to it.
It's not just this sort of disembodied idea that somewhere out there things will be different. It's a day-to-day practice that has some meat to it. So now if I was to go back and change what I wrote about when I wrote about Hope is you know, just only I would expand it. I would say it can be that, but it can also be this.
So my experience of hope has widened, I guess you could say.
Michael Reiley: As we come towards the end here, any other projects, so we'll have links to your website and to your book, but anything else that's coming up in the next few weeks or months you wanna talk about? I.
Abagail Rose Claeke: The next few weeks or months? I have an ongoing somatic learning community called Anchor Community. It's people [00:51:00] can join. It's a monthly membership and we meet it's been once a week for years, but now it's actually gonna be twice a week. It's gonna be Wednesdays and Fridays. People can join that they can apply to join it through my website.
The application process is pretty simple, but I just wanna get to know you a little bit before before you come in. It's really. It's pretty phenomenal if I say so myself. And I say that because while I'm the facilitator, it's the people in the space that really bring it to life. We practice for an hour each time in these, expanding ways that I've been pointing to.
And then part of the time each week is people reflecting back what the practices felt like to them. And I learned so much. I really. Love that space. So that's that's up on my website. That's a really great way to work with me anytime because it's been going, I started it in 2019 and I don't have any plans to stop.
So I feel like I have a pretty solid, grounding in it to say this is [00:52:00] gonna keep going.
And then when people, if you're on my website, you'll also see that one of the things that I created is a tarot deck called the Somatic Tarot. It's self-published, so it only comes out every so often and it's currently out I don't know when it'll come out again.
So if people are tarot fans, they can check that out. And I am working with North Atlantic. I'm working on. A deck currently called the Body Oracle. It might change its name by the time it reaches publication, but it's taking a lot of these ideas and turning it into a card deck format. So you can pull a card and it'll either have a question or some sort of like on inducing idea or some sort of message that the body might offer.
And that'll come out in August of 2026. So I'm working on it and excited to have that out in the world. But yeah, that's. That's more or less what there is.
Michael Reiley: . Thanks so much Abigail for connecting with the SAND community it's been delightful conversation.
Abagail Rose Claeke: Yeah. Thank you so much, Michael. It's been really wonderful. Thank you for having me. . [00:53:00]
