On Resourcing (2024’s Theme)

2024 will not be an easy year.

I don't want to activate your nervous system, or leave you anxious. I don't want you to feel a sense of hopelessness or despair. I know that we have had a long stretch of challenging, painful, and devastating times. But as I sat with this year during my annual deep rest in January, it was just very plainly and starkly true that this year will not be an easy time for the collective.

So what to do with that? Through complex PTSD and a lifetime of many traumas, my wise body learned to expect the worst, all the time, in every situation, and to prepare myself for it. It was only after many years of healing work, therapy, spiritual practice, somatic work, and more that I was able to really understand the difference between preparing for the worst all the time in every situation, and mindfully, prudently resourcing myself so that I could meet challenges with my whole wise self.

Panic and preparation are not, as it turns out, the same thing.

So as I sat with this knowledge about the upcoming year and the challenges it will hold for the collective, and as I did my own learning through Diana Rose Harper's brilliant class, "By Jove!", I slowly realized that my goal this year, my theme in the work I do as The Gender Doula, would be resourcing.

What is resourcing?

Sometimes, certain words get buzzy in the zeitgeist and start to become confusing, or lose their meaning entirely. Also, we can have our own internal meaning for certain words, and not realize that other folks' internal meanings are quite different from ours. Many folks that I hear talking about resourcing frame the conversation in terms of money or scarcity, which are certainly related, though not the whole story. My approach to this concept was deeply informed by Diana Harper's discussion of Generosity in the class I linked above.

If you think of money when you think of resourcing, and/or if your automatic reaction is, "I can't for x reason," I want to invite you to take a deep breath, and try to touch into your curiosity. Could it be true that there's more to this than you've previously assumed? Could it be that there's more available to you than your fear can imagine? That's the place I want to start with resourcing.

At its most basic, resourcing is finding ways to give our whole selves what we need to function well and not be in deficit. What I need and what you need may be different. What resources me in one way may not resource me in all ways. And not being in deficit may be wildly or radically different from what we're accustomed to, and may require a lot of curiosity and learning about ourselves, a lot of resourcing, and a lot of time and practice.

These variables are for each of us to determine for ourselves, with time and effort. But there are many ways to resource the self, and by giving yourself the space to experiment, you can find your own ideal blend! Further, the more you resource yourself, the more spaciousness and capacity you will feel, which can create the opportunity to resource yourself even more! Once you reach a certain level of skill and self-awareness around resourcing, it becomes a self-feeding cycle that results in you having a lot more space to give generously of your gifts to the world. And that is a vital and beautiful thing.

How do I resource myself?

One form of resourcing is through the portal of connection. Connecting to our bodies, connecting to the earth, connecting to the supposedly inanimate, connecting to other living beings, connecting to our breath, connecting to our ideas. Each moment where we connect holds the potential for resourcing. Actualizing that potential can be done in many ways. For example, sitting in the grass on a sunny day. You could sit there and be consumed with worry about this or that, scrolling on your phone, distracted, frustrated, annoyed. Or, you could recognize that there is a potential there for connection, and that connection creates the ability to resource.

This might mean that for 30-60 seconds, you put your phone in your pocket, you close your eyes, and you feel the sun shining on your face and the cool earth beneath you. That for 30-60 seconds, you hear the birds singing or let the grass slip between your fingers. For 30-60 seconds, if it feels good to you, you can take a few breaths, breathing 5% deeper each time. Again, this doesn't have to be 30 minutes. It doesn't have to look any specific way. It doesn't have to be more than a few seconds. It's about taking the time to connect, and allowing yourself to experience whatever that connection brings.

Connecting to the earth in this way may not be available to you for whatever reason. I would love to be enjoying the sun in the grass right now, but as I write this, I am sitting in bed with a sprained foot! I can still resource myself through spending time connecting with my pets, doing breathwork in my bed, reading a book, daydreaming, facetiming with a loved one, holding my partner's hand, or even looking out the window at the big beautiful blue sky and thinking about what it would feel like to allow the sun to warm my skin in that gentle, Los Angeles winter way.

What resources you will be different from what resources me, and these are just a few options. If you want to, you can stop reading this blog post right now and make a little list of the things that resource you, specifically. What makes you feel even 5% better? What activities help you feel full, satisfied? What do you enjoy doing just for fun? Even a single breath taken in an intentional way can be resourcing.

Why Should I Resource Myself?

Resourcing is about giving yourself what you need to such an abundant degree that your "you-ness," the unique set of gifts and energies that you carry in your body, can spill out of you and enrich the soil of the community you live in. Most of us are socialized against this. For one, we are expected and often required to pour all of our time and energy into work in order to survive under late-stage capitalism. But even when we have leftover time or energy, we are often socialized to feel that we must prove our worth and value by constantly giving and over-giving to those around us. This is often especially true for femmes and folks who have been socialized to be feminine, but it also shows up in activist spaces in a major and harmful way for all genders and identities.

One thing that I learned from Diana Harper was that generosity is giving that which is easy to give - in other words, generosity and sacrifice are fundamentally different things. Further, when you want to give more, the first step is to resource yourself adequately, such that you have more excess of your gifts to offer. I found this to be a radically helpful framing for resourcing. Each and every one of us has gifts that we can offer to ourselves and those around us. When adequately resourced, those gifts flow freely and easily. None of us has to give beyond our capacity - that isn't generosity. And when sacrifices are made, they should be made with gravity and intention…not expected from our bosses at our wage-labor jobs on a daily basis.

Resourcing yourself may feel selfish, especially at first, and especially if you have been socialized to give endlessly or to ignore your own needs/body for the purpose of working more/giving more. However, you have your own brilliance, your own genius, and the world needs that. And further, as I mentioned before, this is going to be a tough year…after a string of tough years. I don't know when, if ever, things will be different. We must find ways to move with the challenges of this modern life, and depleting ourselves more and more and more is not the way. It will not lead to our liberation. It must stop, and it will only stop if we start to learn new ways.

2024's Theme: Resourcing

This year, all of my programming is centered and rooted into the theme of resourcing. I am beginning the year with a set of workshops dedicated to this topic. The first, RESOURCE YOUR TRANS SELF, is a workshop for all gender expansive, trans, and non-binary folks who wish to attend where we will use activities, exercises, and discussion to create our own pans for resourcing ourselves, specifically tuned to the challenges of 2024. The second, LOVE YOUR TRANS SELF, is a reworking of a workshop I did last year by the same name, where we will focus deeply on learning how to practice love-as-an-action toward your body and self. The 2024 version of this workshop will go quite a lot deeper on topics such as loving yourself when you're experiencing dysphoria or trans imposter syndrome.

This year I also plan to host a monthly breathwork space, "Breathwork for Trans Liberation," where we will focus on dreaming into the possibilities of our liberation, and grounding ourselves in the magic of transness apart and away from cisgender anxieties.

There's a great deal more to come, and the best way to stay aware of it all (and to be first in line for scholarships as well as discounts) is to join my mailing list. Folks who join also receive access to my gender exploration mini-workbook as well as my monthly series, Ask The Gender Doula, which is a subscriber exclusive.

Regardless of whether you are able to join me in these workshops and spaces, I hope that you will take the time to start creating your own list of what resources you. And remember that it is what you do daily, even for 1-2 minutes, that will make the greatest impact on your life.