Slowing
In the spirit of transparency, we want to share some of the motivations for delaying the launch of Get Free (which we had originally announced as going live this week as the calendar rolls over).
The tldr; it’s not ready.
We want to craft this with the utmost care and attunement with our own bodies- and the reality is- it didn’t happen on the timeline we had originally projected.
The month of December is always a lot. Especially if you are parenting young kids, living in a new place, managing disabilities, grief, or the economic distress that is plaguing more and more of us all the time. As a couple, we are juggling the bulk of these conditions on one side or another.
We have an elementary school aged kid who attends public school. Over the last few years we have watched the return to “normal” mean that precautionary structures in the school and school culture have slipped away to almost nothing. Our kid is one of only a couple people left wearing a mask on the regular in her crowded urban school. She has requested to opt out of attending when she has noticed the seriousness or quantity of sick classmates has pushed her limit. And as parents who are trying to raise a kid who can listen to her body to help her make safe choices, we will generally oblige her staying home when the alternative feels unsafe. And yet, despite her masking and her autonomy to opt out, she gets sick. She had asthma and life threatening allergies as a baby and even though she technically no longer meets diagnostic criteria for either anymore, she has a compromised system. When she gets a cold it takes weeks to shake it. So. Here, today, the 28th of December marks the end of 4 weeks since she last attended school. There is still one more week of holidays to go, and we are all anxious thinking about if/when she returns how long it may be for, before we return to a quarantine; whether to isolate an illness within us, to isolate from illnesses around us that others are not isolating or that maybe, another large scale pandemic may see institutions like schools close again as they did when she was first in pre-school and spring break just never ended.
Everyone knows the phrase, “it takes a village” and most parents of kids these days are woefully aware of how un-villaged we are. Late stage capitalism has us so deeply siloed in nuclear units, working our asses off to keep things afloat, juggling generational baggage, trying to be ok enough to break trauma cycles and give our kids the skills they might need to survive a world that we are squinting to see; a shadow of a new world in the dust of the collapse of the one we were raised in.
When these two pieces come together, our family finds extra layers of isolation. We have very few available supports that take even a shred of the precautions we need to feel safe navigating the ongoing pandemic. In ways that other COVID realist people will understand, every interaction outside our home unit involves calculating risks that could have been mitigated through community care (like masking in public indoor spaces, testing before sharing air, meeting outdoors when possible, staying home when sick, etc) – but instead are left for those who have no choice but to consider them to carry. Disabled individuals and families like ours who have become more and more isolated over the last almost SIX years because people who are not yet disabled have decided that their comfort and convenience comes above and beyond the safety and survival of anyone else.
We both have huge grief around this. And rage. And disappointment. And occasionally shreds of hope, that maybe it could be different. And then again confusion. And despair.
And. As a result of all of this, sometimes our abilities to judge how long things will take are way out of whack. Even though we have it all story boarded, we have pieces of it in various states of drafts, the package isn’t ready.
We wanted it to be ready by the first. And. We need the type of work time that we haven’t gotten yet this month. But also for that to be possible, we need some time to root, regroup and get ourselves in alignment with the content we want to share by showing up to our own personal and collective practices. We wanted to share all this because it feels important to be honest. We know that showing up for this work can be hard. It is for us too, and we have the tools, we have been doing this work for years, AND STILL it can be hard.
When body pain has you stiffened, or parenting labour has you flattened, or immigration paperwork has your brain running on admin mode even when you want to get into your body…. We get it. We are making something that takes these things that we don’t get to opt out of into consideration while supporting the process of opting in to embodiment and pleasure, gradually, in attainable, little ways wherever and whenever we can. It’s a part of dreaming the lives we want into reality without that requiring us to abandon the hard realities of fragile mortal bodies, a housing crisis, parenting kids into a world we don’t know yet, the rise of fascism, and so on.
We are working on it. We are looking forward to sharing it with you and will keep folks updated on adjusted time line projections as they become clearer. In the meantime, you can still buy the course from either of our websites (US dollars on beloved coaching.net or CAN dollars here on softtouchbodies.com) and when you do- you will show us that our offering is desired, needed, and supported. Folks who buy in now will be privileged with preview content as it comes together – consider it an early-bird perk.
