Pavini Moray's Blog, page 2

Still Silly After All This Grief

Yesterday, I attended the No Kings protest.

And all I could do was cry.

Glad for my sunglasses, tears poured from my eyes.

My grief?

The collective’s grief and rage?

I can’t tell the difference right now.

I can’t discern between what I’m being manipulated to feel and what I actually feel.

But it hurts.Tomorrow, I begin teaching Camp LightHeart’s School of the Holy Fool.

At the protest, I watched the clowns tramping and traipsing, frollicking and romping.

They pulled a movable dumpster fire puppet.

They chased each other with pretend DOGE chainsaws.

They handed out fake $100 bills and then grabbed them back.

I was grateful for their presence, but kept thinking:

I can’t play like that right now.

I’m too sad.

How am I going to get back to GlitterHeart, my clown, by tomorrow, in time to teach it?

And then I realized: THAT is the point.

How, amid so much despair this week, can we both feel the entire fullness of our grief, without losing access to our creativity, our deep joy, and our aliveness?

How indeed?

As I write this, I have no idea but I know one thing: it’s easier to figure it out together.

So if you see Camp LightHeart’s School of the Holy Fool as something for others, but not you, well, I’m with you.

But then today, I saw this in the grocery store parking lot.

The despair is never ending, yet I remain SILLY.

It made me think:

How can I become wide enough within myself to hold all of this?

And why is this crucial for my own heart, my good life?

That’s what we’ll be figuring out together this week, in the sweetest possible manner.

Look, friend, I made this camp for us.

It has no barriers to access, a resource for anyone who could use a little lightening up right now, which, in my opinion, is everyone.

Come play.

Give yourself (and us) a couple hours this week, a little silliness, some gentle vulnerability…

We’ll leave feeling lighter, weirder, and more alive, fool’s honor!

Ready for camp?
1. Fill out the registration form
2. Make camp donation via Venmo @pavini-moray
3. You will receive a welcome letter

How to be a Holy Fool

I used to attend an annual gathering of punks, anarchists, and witches.

Every summer, we would meet in the woods for a week and practice liberatory, Earth-based magick together.

We worked for the world we long for.

Just.

Relational.

Animist.

Every year we failed. The world didn't change overnight.

But we kept showing up, knowing that our magick and our power made a difference.

As in any community, conflicts arose frequently.

One of the most fracturing fights was around the clowns.

The clowns were an undefined group within our camp who reached connection with Spirit through clowning: irreverent sass, interruption, disruption, snark, heckling.

When it was good, helping those of us caught in seriousness break through into divine play.

But a significant faction of us found the clowns irritating, disrespectful, and did not appreciate the irreverence. It was NOT FUNNY.

For example, the clowns did a skit at the no-talent show.

Probably 7-8 clowns, some in clownface, others not, stood in a row.

The first brushed their teeth, a great display of foam and vigor.

When they finished, they spat directly into the next clown's mouth, who then brushed their teeth, before depositing the saliva, food bits, and well-used toothpaste into the next clown's open mouth, and so on.

I am nauseated as I write this.

The clowns would mock our well-planned rituals (as well-planned as a bunch of anarchist witches can make) and often conduct their counter-rituals behind the central ritual.

Feelings ran high, and tensions grew intense.

In what would come to be known as the clown problem, after a couple of years, some people had had enough.

A meeting was called.

Clowns were called to be accountable for their clownish ways.Which they clowned.

Now I'm laughing, remembering the mockery, how the clowns Would Not Be Serious.

"This is a very bad situation," they kept yelling.

I was not a clown.

I was an organizer, concerned with everyone at camp having the best possible experience.

I felt the impact the clowns were having.

Had been annoyed a time or two myself when in a particularly tender ritual moment, a cackle or howl would disrupt the energy, or the words to sacred songs were spontaneously rewritten from "Stir the Brew" to "Sip the Goo."

While the clowns put up a grand show of being unfussed by the criticism they were receiving, something inside me knew it hurt.

What they were doing was their best: sacred work to break taboo, and undo white uptight-ness and religious trauma.

They were bringing a form of non-consensual yet very necessary magick and healing.

A different kind of light.

So the day of the meeting, a feeling grew in me: grief, but wild and feral.

We had forgotten this sacred role, and the necessity of its awkward, splendiferous power.

Uncomfortable yet holy.

Disruptive.

Playful.

Childlike with a critical edge of mocking norms.

Freedom for anyone who could claim it.

I, and a couple of others, spoke up for the shamed and projected-on clowns.

We spoke about the gifts they brought to our camp and the necessity of their presence.

We named the divisiveness and asked how these different approaches to Spirit could co-exist.

Was there room at camp for clowns?

Miraculously, hearts opened on both sides.

Tears.

Wonder.

Appreciation for the role the clowns were committed to holding.

Acknowledgment that sometimes, to get to the sacred, you have to go in through the door of the profane.

Mid-week at every camp, we held the HEALING RITUAL, caps intentional.

This was a Big Deal Ritual where some people waited an entire year to receive the healing they needed.

It depended on group cohesion, on offering our best to each other, and letting ourselves receive healing energy from the love the collective held for us all.

In the year of the clown problem, the clowns abducted me during the Healing Ritual.

I won't say it was totally nonconsensual, but I'm not sure what would have happened had I protested.

But instead, I went soft, and they took me down to the forest floor.

Rolling around in the pine duff and dirt, they whispered things in my ears: “Lick the Earth,” one whispered.

Feeding me bark, another commanded, “Chew and swallow!”

I complied.

They bathed me with their spit.

They rolled me over and over, singing and laughing, covering me with dirt.

Until I went quiet, still.

I gave in.

That moment has become a lighthouse, ever shining in my life.

The presence of the holy mystery roared and tickled, leapt and giggled.

I felt it flow in, and bring a tide of quiet ecstasy.

My surrender was absolute: I just let go all the way.

Once the clowns felt it, they left, on to heckle and harass others.

I tried to draw the threads of my undoing into a new weave.

When I could finally peel myself from the forest floor, I arose as GlitterHeart, a silent clown who could face everything with compassion.

A clown with the capacity to be with the world as it is, not turn away, not lose my heart.

I've never told this story.

I write it today because the clowns gave me back an essential piece of my soul that had slipped away.

Freedom through silliness that is without boundaries and limits.

A lack of societal conditioning where I can do anything, but not be a sociopath.

I trust my clown more than any other part.

The most loving parts of me come through GlitterHeart.

I share this now because I want you to join School of the Holy Fool happening next week at Camp LightHeart.

It's not a pitch.

It's an invitation back to irreverent play of the most joyful, highest vibes kind.

No spitting on each other, promise.

That's just what I needed for my clown initiation.

I needed to embrace disgust and see what was beyond my programming.

What was actually going on? Those clowns loved me back to life.

We'll be gentling each other into a more playful way of engaging with the world as it is: broken, blisteringly beautiful, and holy.

Play is the antithesis of trauma.

You might not need to be rolled in dirt or baptized in spit, but I know there's a clown in you waiting to be freed.

A part (perhaps undiscovered) that could lighten your grief, interrupt your programming, and help you laugh yourself back to aliveness.

GlitterHeart didn’t emerge because I was healed.

They came because I stopped trying to be so… put together.

School of the Holy Fool is where we can come undone, for the sake of holiness and wholeness.

It’s where we play our way into freedom.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in reverence, afraid to be ridiculous, or too tired to be earnest anymore, this is your space. This is your clown’s call.

Here I am, nuzzling in your ear.

Come play with me.

Come get whole with me.

Ready for camp?
1. Fill out the registration form
2. Make camp donation via Venmo: @pavini-moray
3. You will receive a welcome letter and packing list

Want more info?

How to let your nose lead your way home

What you need:

About 15 minutes

A nose

This is your final invitation to register for Camp LightHeart’s SMELL THIS POEM week, starting Monday, June 2.

Sessions will be recorded.

Anticapitalist experiment: Camp by $ donation.

Scent as embodiment practice, words and poetry as pleasure and respite from a heavy heart.

More info and registration here

How to Use Your Nose to Find Your Way Home

Muddy Knees and Wet Feet

In a long-ago life, I was a park ranger helping kids fall in love with the wild.

We learned through our bodies: salamanders slipping through our fingers, tectonic plates traced in dirt, water tables crafted with muddy feet.

Everything was hands-on.

We stomped, rolled, trolloped, and meandered through meadows and caves.

We held tarantulas and turtles, cockroaches and snakes.

I loved watching wonder bloom for my kids.

Jamal

Jamal was eleven the first time he stepped into the woods.

His class came on a grant-funded series of field trips, one of the few programs trying to get kids out of concrete and into the trees.

His Cleveland neighborhood was a place where even dandelions had to fight through sidewalk cracks.

While the other kids shrieked about spiders and smeared mud on each other, Jamal led with his nose.

Jamal smelled everything .

Bark, moss, leaf litter, stream stones. He pressed his face into the forest like he was trying to memorize it.

“This tree smells like the library,” he said. “The water smells stinky, like dirt.”
And then:

“ It smells…green. ”

My sense?

He’d caught a memory he never lived, but already knew.

The Bat Cave Game

One of my favorite lessons to teach was about bats.

Some species live in colonies of millions.

Mothers leave each night to feed, and when they return, they find their pup in the chaos using only scent and sound.

Each mother-baby pair has a unique chemical and vocal signature.

Scent is how they survive.

To teach this, we played the Bat Cave Game.

Each pair of kids got a vial of a specific scent: lemon, cedarwood, vanilla, peppermint.

Both kids put on blindfolds.

Baby bats held scent caps.

Mama bats held the matching vial. Then we mixed them all up.

Chaos ensued: shrieking, chirping, wild flailing, a cloud of aromas hanging thick in the field, er, the cave.

But Jamal didn’t rush.

He moved slowly, nose tilted, alert.

He sniffed, paused, moved on.

When he found his baby bat, he threw his arms in the air and shouted, “I found my baby!”

His joy was deep, mammalian, and contagious.

Photo by Nils BouillardBecause smell is presence, and as Jamal showed me, it is also ecstasy.Coming Home

Take a deep breath.

Breathe deeper.

What do you smell?

Smell anchors you in the here and now.

But it also calls you back to a place in your body where memory and emotion are tangled, tender, and alive.

How Do We Smell?

Ever wonder how you perceive smell?

Why does the scent of onions simmering smell good to most people? Or the scent of bacon frying, coffee dripping?

How does the smell of an apple permeate your nose and enter your brain, where you immediately recognize its scent, where a memory or an association comes up?

Scent is both poetic and scientific.

You perceive the aromas of thousands of substances, and make discernments about what is good for you.

Smell the milk, and it's sour? Not good for you.

Smell a rose and want to press your face deeply into her velvet petals until the core of her consumes you, the essence of beauty and magic, divine?

Yep, that's great.

Your nostrils both contain the olfactory epithelium, a small patch of tissue high up in the nasal cavity.

Each of the epithelial cells receives the chemical signatures of scent, and sends an electrical signal to your brain's olfactory bulb, where you begin to interpret it.

The route of smell transmission is short and fast, and it goes right to your feels.

Smell is the only sense that does not pass through the thalamus, but instead goes directly to the limbic system, particularly the amygdala (associated with emotion) and hippocampus (involved in memory).

This is the same circuitry that processes fear, pleasure, love, grief, and your deep emotional patterns.

Scent as Survival

Years ago, broke and unraveling, I’d go stand in the co-op’s essential oil aisle.

I couldn’t afford therapy, but I could uncork the little bottles and inhale.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema

Rose Absolute made my chest warm.

White Pine cleared my mind.

I’d leave feeling more alive.

Not fixed, but less fractured.

Some scents were wrong for me.

Clove and manuka were too thick and sharp.

Later, I found I had a skin sensitivity to both.

My body said no before my mind knew why.

This is scent’s gift: a language older than words, spoken from skin to spirit.

The Landscape of Emotion

The smell of hot slate after summer rain still calms me—earthy, metallic, faintly sweet.

It smells like freedom. Like being ten and barefoot and unafraid.

The smell of my baby’s head.

My high school boyfriend's t-shirt.

Of an old book or new soil.

These scents don’t just remind us who we are, they re-member us, stitching together scattered parts.

The Perfume Studio

Now I help people translate scent into story.

In my studio, I hand clients scent strips and watch their bodies respond.

When someone finds a note they love, their whole system shifts.

Shoulders drop, eyes close, a smile flickers.

Their mind quiets. Their animal body awakes.

I had one client who seemed all business: spreadsheets, strategy, heels on hardwood.

But when she smelled cardamom, her breath caught.

“This reminds me of something I can’t name,” she said.

We built her perfume around it, spicy, warm, mysterious. A scent for her power, yes.

But also her pleasure.

Another client smelled basil and started crying.

“My Nonna’s kitchen,” she whispered. “She’s gone now. I miss her every day.”

We added basil to her blend, a ribbon of memory running through the heart of the fragrance, both ache and joy.

Scent is not frivolous.

It is not superficial.

Scent is how we find our way back.

To ourselves.

To each other.

To what we love and what we've lost.

Whether as baby bats in a dark cave, broke-ass seekers in a food co-op aisle, or clients in a perfume studio, scent bypasses logic and speaks directly to our emotional body.

It is both instinct and invitation to come home, to remember, to feel.

Next Week at Camp LightHeart: Smell This Poem

We’ll be using scent to write, remember, play, and pray.

We’ll explore the poetics of the nose: how aroma shapes emotion, how scent can ground, arouse, transport, and transform.

If you’re longing to feel more you, come.

If you want to follow your nose into memory, magick, or just a little joy, come.

No scent or writing background needed.

Just your breath, your nose, your willingness.

This is a by-donation, no-barrier-to-access offering.

Part of my ongoing anti-capitalist experiment in community, celebration, and poetic living.

Update from the field:

The first week of Camp LIghtHeart ‘How to be like Water’ was a wet, wondrous success.

Needs were met: mine and the campers’.

Hearts were lightened. Joy was shared.

We made beauty together.

Let’s keep going.

So come.Come smell this poem with me.

Let’s remember who we are through scent, story, and the sacred.

​​Logistics:

Week of June 2

Online

Monday 7 pm Eastern, Saturday 12 PM Eastern

Sessions will be recorded.

By donation

Ready to join?

1. Fill out the registration form
2. Submit donation via Venmo: @pavini-moray

P.S. A scent meditation is coming to entice your senses further and welcome you to camp. Watch your inbox this weekend!

Spiritual Hygiene

Someone asked me if there was a recording of the spiritual hygiene practice I offered in April at the book launch for Tending the Bones. There wasn’t, so I made one.

I hope you find it helpful. It’s especially good after you’ve been energetically slimed (you know the feeling) but is also an essential daily practice for me.

Love,

Pavini

Trauma will not save you.

Have you noticed the offering I’ve been singing out this summer?

Camp LightHeart is a summer camp for adults.

It is a grand anticapitalist experiment in teaching beauty, magic, and joy as a form of resistance.

It’s a pay-what-you-can offering with no barrier to access.

I’m trusting that giving my work generously can meet both our needs.

We can playfully collaborate in the solemn work of protecting our hearts—and our vulnerable communities.

Tomorrow begins How to Be Like Water , our first session.

Right now, two brave beings are signed up.

And I want more people to play with.

I recently received feedback that I haven’t clarified just how crucial this work is—that it reads as light, fluffy, maybe even frivolous.

But here’s the truth: pleasure is not fluff.

Joy is not a luxury.

Beauty is not an escape.

This work is serious because it uplifts.

This work matters because it allows us to remember who we are beneath the systems trying to grind us down.

You’ve seen the offerings out there.

So many are focused on trauma and grief.

And don’t get me wrong—that is an essential level of the work.

But.

When I first started my somatic sex coaching practice in 2012, I believed that pleasure would save us.

I made up all kinds of offerings about pleasure and how to feel good in our bodies.

But very few people came, so I pivoted to sexual trauma work, and suddenly, my practice was full.

People came to do the hard, painful stuff.

And while that’s important work, most clients stopped once the suffering was lessened.

We rarely touched exuberance.

We never made it to the kind of aliveness that sings in your cells.

When I dove deep into ancestor work, people lined up to heal transgenerational trauma.

But when it came time to receive the gifts of well, elevated ancestors, many weren’t ready or didn’t feel worthy.

My friend Barbara Carrellas wrote a book called Ecstasy is Necessary.

She teaches that cultivating the capacity to feel beyond good is neurologically essential—it strengthens our full capacity to live, love, and lead.

The leaders and visionaries I trust say the same thing: joy is the medicine for these times.

If we can’t laugh, we’ll cry—if we’re lucky.

If not, we numb out, dissociate, and lose ourselves.

Earnestness and commitment to grief work can only take us so far.

So I’m circling back.

To pleasure.

To joy.

To the beauty that nourishes revolution.

Camp LightHeart isn’t therapy, and it isn’t entertainment.

It’s a remembering space—a devotional, playful, sacred place to reconnect with your body, your joy, and your ability to feel good on purpose.

It’s especially for people who can’t imagine feeling lighthearted right now.

We’re not trained to turn toward what feels good.

We’re taught to brace, fix, hustle for healing.

We’ve been schooled in scarcity, not delight.

We’re fluent in crisis—but illiterate in joy.

Most of us don’t yet know how to receive offerings that aren’t transactional, or that don’t demand heavy lifting to feel valid.

So when something nourishing arrives without a price tag, we hesitate.

Capitalism has taught us to mistrust the generous, to overlook the beautiful, to stay focused on what’s wrong.

That’s negativity bias, baked into our bones.

So—I’m inviting YOU to register for Camp LightHeart this summer.

There are many sweet, potent offerings all summer long.

Five different experiments. Different magicks.

And this week?

It’s all about water.

Photo by Vishal Banik

If you have a relationship with water—or want to deepen one…

If you’re longing for softness, spaciousness, and sweetness…

If you want to root into beauty to stay strong in your resistance…

If you are a water mystic…

Then come.

Bring a beloved vessel filled with water from home.

Let’s pray with it.

Play with it.

Become like it.

I want this experiment to work.

Because no one is coming to save us.

It’s us who will save us.

The ability to cultivate lightheartedness amid war is one of our sharpest tools.

Come float.

Come drink.

Come play dolphins.

Come be water with me.

Merfolk photo shoot with Shoog McDaniel

With big, bright love from my glowing, radiant heart,
PaviniReady to come to camp?

Fill out the registration form.

Make payment via Venmo: @pavini-moray

You'll receive a welcome email with a supply list and instructions.

P.S.

I also received feedback from people wanting to come but unable to make the time, and I said I wouldn’t be recording sessions.

I realize now that puts up an unnecessary barrier to access.

I will be recording sessions and sending them out to participants.

Want more info? Have Questions?

Here is the info for all five weeks of camp

Here is last week’s post about water

How to live a life in the water

The edge of a pool, just before you dive in, is a scary place!

I was waiting to be seated at a South Indian hipster restaurant on a Friday night.

When they give me the last seat at the last table, I find myself directly across from another white person.

He’s handsome, that’s what I notice first.

Tall and lanky, dark hair, black denim vest with a big amber necklace.

He smiles, I avert my eyes in nervousness.

Which land on the empty wheelchair trike just next to him.

I order. Try not to look at the hot man across from me.

I should just ask him, I think.

Then freak out.

Because you don’t ask a total stranger if they want to be your Watsu demo person.

Even though your aquatic bodywork teacher has told you you have until tomorrow to find someone, and you know no one in this town.

It’s just not done. Not socially acceptable.

Especially if they are in a wheelchair, and you are new to training in this water modality and don’t know how to work with whatever his body might need.

Especially if they’re the kind of handsome that makes you breathless and panicky, to be honest.

But what if I just asked?

Isn't it fascinating how the things we judge the hardest often turn out to be the medicine we denied ourselves?

So it was for me with Watsu.

If you aren't from California, you may not have heard of this aquatic bodywork developed in the 1980s by Harold Dull at Harbin Hot Springs.

In Watsu, both client and practitioner are in warm water.

The client is cradled and moved in flowing sequences that allow deep softening.

Having lived in California and visited Harbin, I carried heavy judgment: hippies, man-buns, tantra-eyegazing, blurred boundaries, sleazy exchanges.

I saw vulnerability and thought: no thank you.

Too many messy emotions and feelings. Too touchy-feely.

But in India, I kept receiving a message—put your body in warm water.

I wanted to visit Auroville, the intentional city in Puducherry, and a friend said the best entry point was to attend an offering.

And they offered Watsu trainings—held right on the warm, salty Bay of Bengal.

I signed up reluctantly.

I wouldn’t tell anyone.

To my surprise, the training was profound.

My body loved receiving aquatic bodywork—and offering it.

There’s something about being held in warm water—your body stops bracing.

Your mind stops strategizing.

The peace and beauty I experience while practicing are ecstatic.

Not always, of course.

And the giving—moving another’s body through water while staying rooted in my own. It takes great focus.

But no one asked me to eyegaze!

And the water, oh, the water.

The first time my blood sugar dropped into my ideal range, I didn’t connect it to the pool.

A month later, the same thing happened at a different Watsu pool.

The only constant was spending significant time in warm water.

I connected the dots: I was partially in India to learn how to work with diabetes, and the answer was so simple.

What if the medicine isn’t complicated?

What if it’s warm, wet, and already surrounding us? I’m holding T’s body in the warm pool.

This is the first time in 12 years the former ocean swimmer has been submerged in water.

His ALS made it almost impossible to climb down the ladder into the warm pool, but we went took our time, went slow.

On the bottom step he collapsed into the water, and I had to haul him back up to the surface to breathe.

“My body won’t behave like a normal body. It will seize up, and I’ll sink,” he’d told me the night before at the restaurant when I had finally worked up the courage to ask if he’d come.

“I’ll hold you the entire time, and make sure you are well-floated,” I’d replied.

His eyes had gleamed, and now here we were.

I moved gently through the pool with his body

Sometimes, being a beginner is an advantage.

I don’t know all the right moves.

I don’t know how to work with a body with ALS.

I’m learning with T’s tender body, and I feel a strong sense of responsibility to make the experience safe, tender, unforgettable.

So I do what my teacher taught: I make my hands like water.

I hold softly, let water do the work. Release all effort.

From the water, the world looks different.

If the conditions are just right, you can sink up to your nose, and the water and the horizon blend together.

Your brain perceives a quiet vastness.

While in India, immersing in warm water became a miracle of healing.

Just by returning to my aquatic roots, human ailments were soothed.

The near-weightlessness of water grants freedom, balance, grace, ease.

My inner six-year-old ballerina leaped and twirled joyfully.

Joints hurt less. Flexibility returns. Mental overworking dissolves.

In water, flow states arrive effortlessly.

Stillness is always near.

It feels like a miracle that the best medicine for my diabetes is something I love.

The question became: how can I live more of my life in the water?

And what if everyone could feel this un-gripping?

What if we could be like water?

We come from water.

The slippery dolphin-seal part of the brain remembers gliding, surfacing, diving.

It remembers sensing loved ones through means other than sight, or Share Live Location.

In water, we remember who we are at our core: fluid, alive, in motion.

Identities dissolve.

Mental chatter sloshes away.

We become children again, dancing through a dense medium that holds and uplifts.

Two of my water teachers have spent so much time in the water they’ve lessened bone density!

Especially for those with larger bodies, fat becomes a gift: warmth, flotation, and liberation.

Gravity loses its grip.

In the water, I feel the freest.

I want to be like water.

I recently drove along the South Toe River in Yancey County, North Carolina.

During Hurricane Helene, when the devastating storm hit my hometown, water rose 26 feet—about three stories—above the riverbank.

What had been a riverside stretch of homes, studios, and trailers was now bare scarland, littered with splintered trees.

Even the small white church across the road from my favorite swimming hole had floated away, empty foundations marking where it had once held the sacred every Sunday.

The river takes what the river takes.
What the river takes, let it go.

Even as I grieved, I celebrated.

Be it calcium from bone or a community church, water’s power is undeniable.

It carves canyons, drowns cities, wears down mountains—and inside us, it moves emotion, memory, and our very blood.

Water can destroy—but it can also heal. Our bodies, our spirits, our grief.

I want to be like water.

Lacking a Watsu pool or a hot spring (my longest-held dream), how can I still live a water life?

Once we know the environment our body thrives in, how do we move toward it?

I can’t live as my Watsu teachers do, submerged daily—but I can focus on water’s power.

How often do I touch water each day?

Constantly: the toilet, the shower, the tea kettle.

The sink, the bathtub, the water bottle.

Washing dishes, misting plants, distilling rosewater, watering the garden.

Changing the cat’s fountain, filling the water filter. Cleaning the floors.

Pouring libations. Praying over ritual water. Dumping the mop bucket.

Hosing the car.

For now, living a water life means attending to water.

Making a temple of daily tasks.

After six months of cold bucket baths, hot water spraying from the wall feels miraculous.

I try to remember—not to take the waters of my life for granted.

Water touches every living being daily.

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water," wrote scientist and philosopher Loren Eiseley.

Across world religions, water is sacred—medium of communion between human and divine.

It purifies body and soul. It symbolizes birth, death, transformation.

Rituals across traditions: pouring, sipping, blessing, bathing, infusing.

Tea ceremonies. Libations. Rivers. Tubs.

Hands cupped in reverence, spilling water back to the Ocean.

A life in the water is not always about where you are.

It’s about what you pay attention to.

It takes T. 15 minutes to climb out of the Watsu pool.

The bathroom is not accessible, so he has to pee in the public shower.

I hover, not knowing my role on land now the session is over.

Once he is dressed, we sit and sip tea, he in his trike chair, and me on a stone bench in the garden.

I wait for him to speak, as I’ve been taught.

“As soon as I got into the water, I felt completely free.”

Neither of us mentions the salt water that leaked from our eyes during the gorgeous hour we’d spent in silence together.

Nor do we discuss the collaborative elegance of moving in flow and rhythm within the range of his body and my skill level.

Something more intimate than sex had passed between us: Surrender.

Our wet goodbye hug lasts far longer than you’d expect between two strangers who met over dinner.

I recently wrote about Camp LightHeart, the adult online summer camp I am holding as an anti-capitalist experiment.

Can I offer guidance and hold space for content I love, like water, and simultaneously meet your needs and mine, while making all classes have no financial barrier to access?

You can read more about Camp LightHeart here.

In these times, I hear it may not feel very serious to focus on feeling good.

But as many wise teachers say, feeling good in this moment is an act of revolution.

Sure, you can attend all the trauma rituals you need to, but feeling good deliberately? That’s radical!

I’ll be writing a post to introduce each week of Camp LightHeart.

We start this coming Monday 5/19.

So, if you're craving more pleasure and flow in your life… and if you are tired of the constant exhaustion and heaviness…

Join me for the first week of Camp LightHeartHow to Be Like Water I remember the immense feeling of freedom, swimming with wild dolphins last year!

Come, feeling too heavy to float. Swim away with more access to movement and joy!

Can water teach us how to soften, play and move again? I think so.

During this week, we will engage with the mystery of water.

We will explore flow states, make potions, and use hydration as a magick spell.

We will play ritually like dolphins and manatees.

We will remember to notice the sunlight sparkling on water, and fill our cup with light.

And you’ll be doing it in the company of others, each one remembering their own wild, shimmering water body.

Your water pod!

Sometimes, finding your way back to yourself is easier when you’re held—by water, by others, by rhythm and ritual.

Note: There is no need to have access to a pool or tub to participate.

We will explore vessels for water, and how containment gives our watery nature permission to be!

Using magick, somatics, fun, and experimentation, you will deepen your connection with water, perhaps becoming or reviving your water mystic along the way.

This week’s vibe: "Let me be like water" by Lo Wolf.

Live gatherings on Zoom: Monday 5/19 7 PM ET & Saturday, 5/24, 12 PM ET.

Cost: GAYBAGS (Give as you are able, but always give something.) Suggested donation $75-125.

Let's float together! Let your body be held. Let your spirit dissolve into joy.

Ready to come to camp?

Fill out the registration form.

Make payment via Venmo: @pavini-moray

You'll receive a welcome packet, supply list, and instructions.

How to Have a Fun, Anti-Capitalist Summer

Recently, I gathered with a small coven of Glitter Joyriders to trade spells of economic rebellion, laughter, and lightness in a world heavy with capitalism.

Together, we practiced turning toward the internalized narratives about money and capitalism, feeling their weight, and then lifting our hearts toward freedom and lightness.

I keep noticing that the people I love most in the US are struggling right now.

And many of them believe, deep down, that they’re somehow to blame for their unhappiness.

I don’t buy it.

I’m not buying much these days—neither the grim stories of despair around me, nor the stuff on Amazon that I used to try and fill a hole inside me.

Instead, I’m practicing lightheartedness in the face of oppression, as countless ancestors and forebears have done before me.

How do I stay alive, keep my flame burning bright, when horror surrounds me?

I’ve started doing spiritual practice in unusual spaces: the dump, the crematorium, the mall.

Can I find freedom here? And here? What about here?

The most radical way I can think of to live with a light heart inside of capitalism is to radically orient my days around what delights me most.

Like Poetry. Magick & Ritual. Perfume. Play. Somatics. WATER!

Out of this conversation with readers, a spark lit in me—what if we gathered again, more intentionally, to practice joy as resistance?

What if I made a summer camp for adults?

Welcome to Camp LightHeart! No lie—it’s heavy out there. And that’s exactly why we need more levity.

Camp Lightheart is a five-week joyful rebellion against burnout and boredom—join for one week or all, pay what you can, and spritz rosewater on our revolution.

Think crafts, games, potions, silly songs.

But also reverence, depth and care.

Camp Lightheart is my answer (or maybe question?) as to how we can thrive in atypical times that require the best of us: our hearts, our creative minds, and our capacity for evolution.

Camp is an experiment for grown-ups tired of the heaviness of being we experience in late capitalism.

Camp LightHeart is uplifting, but with teeth: playful, potent, and made for these times.

The throughline is joy.

Each week, we’ll explore a new theme — from sacred clowning to perfume as a portal — designed to reignite your silliness, playfulness, and aliveness.

This isn’t toxic positivity or spiritual bypass.

This is actual lightheartedness: like a phoenix rising from the depths of grief, bathing in glitter, and then spritzing itself with rosewater before reemerging to fight like hell!

We’ll meet twice a week on Zoom with a joyful, friendly crew.

Cuz community and friends are one of the most necessary ingredients for revolution.

Mondays for playful practices, Saturdays for embodied integration.

In between, I'll send simple invitations for solo exploration: scent experiments, clown rituals, creative prompts, and subversively silly field trips into your real life.

Weekly Camp ThemesWeek 1: How to Be Like Water

Week of May 19

How can water help you release and be freer, in body and heart?

The theme of this week is Dissolving, Flowing, & Sparkling.
Can water teach us how to soften, dissolve, and move again?
This week, we hydrate like mystics.
We make potions. We put our bodies in water. We play like dolphins and manatees.
A soft return to feeling good.

Especially for those who feel too heavy to float right now.

Vibe for this week: Let me be like water by Lo Wolf

Week 2: Smell This Poem

Week of June 2

How can a living a poetic life nourish you, for now and forever?

The theme of this week is perfume as prayer, and poems as scent!

We perfume prayers and breathe poems.
We write scent-memoirs. We remember ourselves through smell and syllable.
This week, scent and language become altars.

Perfect for writers and non-writers alike—anyone seeking to live more poetically.

Vibe for this week: Slip Away by Perfume Genius

Week 3: School of the Holy Fool

Week of June 16

How can play reset your nervous system, loosen rigidity, and give you deeper access to creativity and fun?

For adults who have forgotten how to play.

The theme of this week is remembering how to be ridiculous.

Clowns have always been holy disruptors.
This week is pure silliness.
We loosen nervous systems and give our inner jokesters airtime.
No red nose required—just a willingness to laugh yourself alive.

Vibe for this week: Freedom by Jon Batiste

Week 4: Practicing Joy as Activism

Week of July 14

How can delight be a consistent element of your world-shaping work?

Coup Clutz Clowns host a hilarious counter-protest

Joy can be a discipline. Delight can be a weapon.
This week, we make joy a daily ritual—for ourselves, and the world we long to build. We’ll build practices and routines that center our purpose, and create embodied pleasure rituals we use to anchor our activism.

For people who crave a daily practice (spiritual or otherwise) but struggle to make it stick.

Vibe for this week: Where is the love? by Black Eyed Peas

Week 5: Rosy Delight

Week of July 28

How can relating to roses soothe, uplift, and inspire you?

Roses I visited in France last year

The theme this week is Roses.

The rose is sultry, silly, ancient, ablaze.
We meet her through rituals of beauty, scent, and bloom.
She becomes our guide to sensuality, softness, and sacred pleasure.

For scent geeks, beauty lovers, and anyone craving more magick.

Vibe for this week: Glorious by Ma Muse

About the Financial Exchange for Camp LightHeart

I'm continually exploring anti-capitalist practices—how can we help each other meet all our collective needs?

I practice trusting that when I share my gifts generously in service of our shared joy and healing, my own needs will be met.

Not only that, but if you come and play with me, your needs will also be met.

This is a FUN-raiser: I'm taking my daughter to her ancestral roots in Bulgaria to celebrate her birthday. We will attend the Rose Festival in Kazanlak! 🌹

Me and my kiddo. The delight fruit don’t fall far from the tree.

All camps are by donation. There are no barriers to access.

The financial model is GAYBAGS: Give as you are able, but always give something.

If you cannot spare any cash, let me know what you’ve got to trade!

Logistics

Live gatherings on Zoom: Mondays 7 PM ET & Saturdays 12 PM ET.

Meetings will not be recorded.

Is Camp Lightheart for you?

You’re welcome if you’re feeling too heavy, tired, or serious even to imagine joy.

You’re welcome if you long to feel good, on purpose, without apology.

You’re welcome if you want to wear a ridiculous hat, sip rose tea from a chipped cup, and remember what it feels like to be a real, live person again.

Camp LightHeart is made for the tender-hearted and the wild ones—queer folks, artists, healers, weirdos.

You know who you are: the too-much ones, too sparkly, too strange.

All genders, all bodies, all backgrounds: come as you are.

Biodegradable glitter encouraged. Capitalist despair not required.

Camp LightHeart Overall Vibe: JOY (Unspeakable) Voices of Fire.

Ready to come to camp?

Fill out the registration form.

Make payment via Venmo: @pavini-moray

You'll receive a welcome packet, supply list, and instructions.

Let’s play like our healing depends on it.

Because maybe it does.

In glitter, in grief, in giggles,

Pavini

Questions? Reach out by messaging me on Substack or hit reply to this email.

I'm a silly goose

Hello dear one,

I got back from India a month ago, and it’s been a swirl of sensations ever since.
I won’t write about it—you already know.

The biggest thing I’ve noticed since returning is the impact of capitalism—on the bodies of my loved ones, on my relationships, on everything.

Capitalism. No way out.

It’s a heady word for something we all live inside. But I’m not writing from my head. I’m writing from my body. From my heart.

What I’m noticing most is the pull to numb out:
social media, substances, news, sugar—pick your poison.

And when I don’t numb, what arises is grief.
Non-specific. Ambient. Thick.

I’d rather feel grief than feel nothing;

But what I long for is to feel lighthearted.

That feeling of buoyancy. Softness. Connected.

It’s hard to access in the U.S. right now.

Yesterday, on a walk, I saw a bumper sticker:
“Who’s a Silly Goose?”

My first response? Judgment.

Then I wondered: What kind of person puts that on their car?

Maybe someone lighthearted!

That’s been my big prayer for months now: Let me be light-hearted. Let me light from within.

So…
I’m coming out:
I’m a silly goose.

And I want to talk with people who get it. You know, other silly geese.

Let’s gather

In the past, I’ve hosted monthly drop-in sessions for paid subscribers—support around creative process, embodiment, relationships.

Right now, I don’t want to hold space. I just want to be in space—with others asking the same big, heavy, silly, aching questions.

So I’m hosting a free, informal Zoom hangout:

Wednesday, April 23 at 4 PM Eastern
No need to be a paid subscriber.

Come and we’ll laugh, cry, play, and strategize.

Register so I can send you a reminder email.

Register Here

Bring a question. Or a story. Or just yourself.

Here’s the question I’m holding close:

How do we stay lighthearted in these times?

Photo by annie pm on Unsplash

With tenderness,
Pavini

A love letter to you from India

Dearest,

When I left the U.S. for an undetermined amount of time of solo traveling in India, I thought it would be easy to write to you each week and keep up with my Glitter Joyride posts.

It has been anything but.

Mainly because I am immersed in meeting my basic needs, processing an endless stream of incoming information, and staying out of the way of don't-give-a-fuck cows, thieving monkeys, and Jaipurian shopkeepers determined to empty my wallet of rupees.

But I miss you. I miss writing to you.

India's been, well, a lot.

There has been so much joy but also much hand-wringing.

I’ve learned some new survival skills and resurrected old ones from when I lived in Bulgaria for a couple of years post-communism.

Like how to keep your pants clean while using the good old squat toilet.

For example, I've gotten obsessive about reading reviews for places I might visit: I can now sniff out a good homestay that will meet my needs: must have an electric kettle!

I won't even consider eating somewhere with less than 50 visits documented by other diners. If there is any mention of cockroaches, it's a hard no.

But how are you??

From here, the wave of fear and panic rising from the U.S. looks like a mushroom cloud.

I am worried, about you and me both, and figuring out how to manage my return.

The distance has kept me buffered: it’s been easy to sidestep terror.

LIke come on, how can you legislate the gender experience of humans? It makes me laugh, but tears are in my eyes.

While I am impacted by our collective nervous system, I also have a perspective from the outside.

When my home in Asheville was hit by a hurricane last fall, just after I arrived in India, I felt similarly.

Watching a tragedy unfold from afar is weird.

It hurts, but I don't always feel like I have the right to the first-order grief of it.

And honestly, there is something welcome in the choice to modulate how big my feelings get. Even if I feel a bit guilty.

Over two months have passed since I've been able to write to you.

I hope you know I’ve thought about you everyday, sent love and prayers and blessings.

During that time, we've both gone through so much I imagine we are both unrecognizable in some ways.

But know this: I miss your face, your voice, the warm hug of your body.

So what, exactly, have I been doing all this time?

It's a fair question; and I’m happy to be able to share some of what I've gathered.

I have practiced every day.

~In every room I stay in (there have been MANY), I cleanse the space.

Then I construct an altar.

~I sit on the floor and breathe, pray, & chant.

~To quote the eternal light, Erykah Badu, ‘I try a little yoga for a minute.’

~I call out to my protectors and guardians. I honor my ancestors.

~I remember my clear intention for my time in India:

The funny thing about intentions is the layers of surprise they can unfurl.

When I wrote the intention for a lighter existence, I thought I was talking about the heaviness I carry in my heart. But much more has been revealed.

Can I share something I wrote in my journal with you?

To have a lighter existence, one must:

Shift one's center of gravity to the heart!

Learn to light from within, glowing the color of candlelight through rose quartz.

Notice the light in all ways it plays: on water, refracting through smog, pouring through one's eyes each morning.

Learn to be light-hearted, even during illness and duress.

Gather light from all the shining places: temples, trees, and bodies of water.

What have I been doing?

When I was little, I loved a book called Frederick.

It was about a mouse who was a poet.

While the other mice gathered seeds and nuts for winter, Frederick gathered colors, scents, and visions.

He gathered the light of the sun.

The other mice scoffed at Frederick for not gathering food with them.

They berated his foolishness.

But once the food ran out, it was his gathered words and memories that nourished them.

His poetry warmed them, and got them through the collective trauma of winter starvation.

Isn't that the situation now? Collective trauma & the winter of starvation?

Isn't your soul famished, I mean like really fucking ravenous?

Isn't your appetite voracious for beauty, meaning, calm, and connection?

Isn't your lifeblood underfed and undernourished despite the abundance around you?

Sweetheart, it's not your fault.

Our culture is dying from malnourishment.

So yeah, I have been Fredericking.

I have been gathering the colors, smells, experiences, conversations, graces, generosities, hardships, tears, and connections.

I have been tasting, smelling, feeling, forgetting, and then remembering how to be me without a rigid identity.

Half the time, I'm perceived as female, and the other half as male. I like it.

I've bought many pretty clothes tailored for my body.

I've developed adornment practices of kohl, perfume, and jewelry as forms of spiritual protection.

I've been gifted a powerful technique for spiritual hygiene.

I'm trying to gather goodness for us both, beloved.

But that's not all I've been doing.

Traveling last week, I spent the night sleeping on the floor of the All Faith chapel at the Delhi airport.

Around 2 AM, a mother with her young adult daughters entered the space.

She smiled at me, and I bowed my head to her.

They were Muslim and began a ritual format that seemed to be a well-practiced rhythm of obeisance and prayer.

After donning their ritual garb, first, the mother would prostrate herself in Sujūd, followed by her daughters.

Beautiful to watch through half-asleep eyes, they prayed me to sleep.

When I woke around 4, they were asleep, curled around each other.

All of us doing this completely human thing of taking rest, in the most secure place we could find.

I felt safe with them, our shoes snuggling together outside the door.

I’ve been remembering how to be human with others.

So what else have I been doing?Rebuilding faith.

Faith that an organizing principle exists.

That all of it, ALL of it, holds meaning beyond my comprehension.

While my life is profoundly personal, so is everyone's; ultimately, we are more the same than different.

I had forgotten how to look at people and let people see me.

I had become afraid of strangers and their eyes.

How about you?

Do you meet the eyes of those around you and trust that you will be welcomed?

Trust they will not harm you, and if they try, do you trust you have your boundaries, guardians, and rituals on lock that ward off that which does not serve?

At a temple last week, I was doing a private ritual with Ari just outside the temple doors.

I could see the Goddess Siddha Bhairavi within, had already visited Her bearing the gifts I had brought.

I had brought my head low to the cool, wet marble floor, stained my knees red with Her vermillion, and received her blessing.

This is not Siddha Bhairavi because no photos were allowed. This is Mangala Maa. But you get the vibe.

As we sat outside the temple doing our private thing, three Indian women approached, curious about what we were up to.

I looked at them, my heart full of magick and power.

I did not smile.

Neither did they.

I simply let them see me, connected to Her, in my whole, weird, witchy presence.

I looked at them, three women a wee bit strange, on pilgrimage to a temple to a fierce Goddess who is worshipped through wine and blood and meat, way outside of Hindu orthodoxy.

I let the three women see me, and I looked to see them.

What is it to be seen in your full glory?

Who do you let see you that way, without protection, without guarding?

With no false confidence or shields up, not trying to be seen as anything but who you are in that exact moment?

We tried to speak, and did not share a common language.

But yet.

There was something in seeing each other deeply without being friendly, well-socialized, or trying not to be freaky.

Here we all were, five weirdos devoted to Her.

Five devotees who allow our hunger to travel our bodies to far-flung temples in search of… grace? Connection? Magick?

Siddha Bhairavi is said to be She who will convey any blessing you ask for.

What will you request?

But be careful.

Two weeks ago, a tuk-tuk driver got clever with me.

Thought he would charge me an extra 100 rupees for some made-up bullshit reason.

Okay, I said.

I will pay you.

He will never know that I continuously tip far beyond 100 rupees.

But not him.

He got just what he demanded.

So be wise in your prayer, and leave space for Her to give you more than you know you need.

My beloved, so far away: Are you starving?

In this time of immense turmoil, do you lust for more aliveness?

Is something in you emaciated with hunger, longing for all that you know is lost but cannot name: community, belonging, hope?

I know I am.

My hunger is for connection with Her, the active principle of Life and Creation.

By Her I mean, of course, the Goddess, Kali, Time, the Holy Spirit, call it what you will.

My hunger will not abate.

In the hunger, I find something I can hold onto: yearning.

Yearning drives me to give up all of the habits that keep me from being present.

Yearning for Her helps me be with what is as grace.

Helps shed the layers of protection that seek to insulate me from this moment, just as it is, perfect and imperfect simultaneously.

Because if truly all of this is Her, my suffering is Her wanting to experience suffering.

My pleasure is Her wanting to know pleasure.

Once tripping on mushrooms, I realized that all the cells in my body had their own life.

They were part of me, but also individuals.

Whatever I put into my body, they received.

I imagined my cells, high on shrooms, impacted by my decisions, and me, never ever considering them as beings.

This is how I imagine myself with Maa: I am a cell in her body.

My whole life is actually just a part of a bigger system.

Macro and Micro, fractalling ad infinitum.So what I've been doing all this time, beloved, is learning to Trust again.

Learning to trust meeting the eyes of others.

Learning to trust myself, and know I can meet my basic needs.

Trust that my marriage can withstand extended periods of separation while we each do our own work.

Trust that it is okay, more than okay, to follow the breadcrumbs of Spirit; even when they don't seem cohesive, there is usually a greater plan.

I got angry with a taxi driver last week.

I wanted to go to a temple and had it pulled up on Google Maps.

He refused to follow my directions.

I fumed about patriarchy and stupidity for a while, to no avail.

At some point, I just gave in to trust.

Trusted that everything was perfect, just as it was.

Trusted that he was taking me wherever I was supposed to go.

Which, not surprisingly, was the temple where I met the trio of witchy women, saris smeared with sindoor, sparkling in the smoggy yellow sun.