Pavini Moray's Blog, page 2

Chai Society #1: The Goddess is Queer

My mentor Joseph Kramer always says, “Be available for Surprise!” and it is the best possible way for me to be in India.

Welcome to Chai Society

Semi-regular audio musings capturing moments and ponderings in sensory detail, inviting you along as I feel India.

I especially welcome your comments and reactions on the Chai Society broadcasts. Let me know how they land!

Two Lives, One Body

Love,

This week I return to India. Excited. A little nervous, but less than last year.

No return ticket: I can stay up to 180 days.

My intention this trip is connection.

Last year, I thrived on daily face-to-face connection.

Then I came back to the U.S. and it vanished.

Back in the hyperindividualistic, isolated consumer culture, I couldn’t figure out how to bridge the gap.

These past six months have been heavy, full of grief.

Watching American culture and capitalism work on the bodies of those I love, including my own.

After I returned, I drifted for weeks.

Cooked and learned Indian dishes

Developed a family chai recipe with my kiddo

Barely worked

At least my houseplants thrived with all the care!

It took me ten weeks to land back in my life.

I wanted to keep the light-heartedness I’d found in India, so I created Camp LightHeart, an anti-capitalist summer camp for adults.

Teaching what I wanted, by donation, was delightful, but ultimately unsustainable for earning a livelihood in the US.

I feel split.

In India, I am Pavini: temple every day, singing, praying, living in magick.

In the U.S., I am Vin: running a business, writing, teaching, helping couples and leaders thrive.

Two lives. One body. Different priorities.Staying Connected

This trip, I want to stay more connected. To you, and to the part of me that cares about writing and teaching.

I’d love to promise weekly Substacks, but based on last year, that’s unlikely.

So here’s my idea: a short, frequent podcast from India.

Just enough time to drink a tiny clay cup of chai

Soundscapes, colors, textures

Musings, what I’m pondering in the moment

Would this bring beauty into your life? Would you feel more connected?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hit reply and tell me.

Love,

The Hot Air Balloon and the Body: Trauma Says Grip, Life Says Let Go

Growing Up in Cleveland

I came up in Cleveland, a rust-belt polluted midwestern city.

In the 70s and 80, when I lived there, you couldn’t feel too much.

You couldn’t be a snowflake.

Snowflakes got pounded into the asphalt of the playground, melted in the goo of hot summer.

Their bikes were stolen.

They were brutalized.

As a teen, the punk shows I went to were violent.

People always got injured.

Often, the cops showed up with their own brand of violence.

Feelings were physical.

The throbbing of eardrums the day after a show.

Bruised arms and shins from the mosh pit.

That was feeling.

You survived, or you didn’t.

Many tender friends I loved did not make it.

But I did.

The Price of Survival

Years later in somatic therapy, I learned the price of survival.

I couldn’t feel shit.

Not sensations, not emotions.

I was numb.

Now I practice feeling my aliveness.

I cry every day.

It has taken years of work to admit that.

Years to hear the truth and wisdom my body shares.

I value the healing work we all have to do, and the healing you have done.

Still, this week two important people told me versions of the same thing: your purpose is not healing.

You are here to live.

Healing is what you do so you can actually live.

Body Wisdom and Traumatic Responses

As a somaticist, I have dedicated my career to the study of bodies and embodied learning.

I hold a deep respect for the wisdom of my body.

When it tightens upon meeting someone new, I take that as information.

The animal self that is me is responding to something the mind that is me cannot perceive.

But how do I know when to listen to my body and when to listen to my brain?

Because while I want to honor my body, I don’t want to be ruled by traumatic responses.

This story shows why you need both your mind and your animal body.

A very tiny me, way up in the skyThe Hot Air Balloon

My partner Ari arranged a hot air balloon ride as a birthday surprise.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve longed to go up in a balloon.

At nine, I read The Twenty-One Balloons , a novel by William Pène du Bois.

A retired schoolteacher takes an ill-fated balloon trip that lands him on Krakatoa, an island full of great wealth and inventions.

It sounded magickal to fly above the world, blown by the wind, no control of direction.

An act of faith that you’d return to Earth intact.

When we lifted off, I was fine for the first ten feet.

The sensation was gentle, like being floated in a warm pool of water, someone safe holding up your body.

By twenty feet my body started to panic.

At fifty, I had to stop looking at the ground, raising my chin so I only saw the mountain in the distance.

Riding in the balloon, I had to override what my body demanded.

Gripping for dear lifeThe Conversation

Body: We are going to die. Get down in the basket.
Brain: We may die, but it won’t be because you’re standing.
Body: If I stand, I’ll lock every muscle.
Brain: That’s fine.
Body: I’m gripping the basket, Ari’s overalls, the fuel tank.
Brain: Grip all you want, you aren’t going to fall.
Body: This is terrifying, get low now.
Brain: I know you’re scared, but your fate was sealed when you stepped into the basket. You will survive or not, but in the meantime, let’s be present for this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Halfway into the voyage, the panic eased.

My grip loosened. I let go enough to drink water.

The urge to kneel disappeared.

I fell in love with the floating clouds as we drifted silently over mountain tops.

This world was lovely.

Healing and Aliveness

The trauma gurus on Instagram have huge followings because people need to heal.

Trauma is compelling, marketable, profitable.

This should make you angry. It makes me furious.

As much money as I could make off your trauma, I don’t want to anymore.

I want to be alive and be paid for teaching others to savor life while they have it.

It was trauma that made me cleave to the edge of the basket.

Trauma that grooms instincts so we think we should hide when we could fly. But gripping would not save me in a crash.

Cleaving to anything, whether a basket, an identity, or a narrative, will not save you when you are blown by a force you cannot see but can feel.

What I saw when I let goLiving, Not Just Surviving

Clench all you want.

You are still in a basket 5000 feet above the ground, with no idea how or when this journey ends.

You can cling and you can trust.

Both are possible.

Sometimes you listen to your body.

Sometimes you let your brain talk back.

That is how you live, not just survive.

“But My Ancestors Were Assholes!"

“My ancestors were colonizer assholes. I don't want to be associated with them.”

“Chosen family is way more important to me than blood.”

These are actual statements I've heard from folks when I ask how they feel about their lineages.

And I get it.

Especially in a culture of broken families, colonization, extremism, and terribly poor relational skills, it makes total sense that you might want nothing to do with your blood.

But here's the thing: your blood is part of you, whether or not you associate yourself with it.

You share DNA, family traits, and history with those people.

As I wrote about in my ancestor series Part 1: Are the Ancestors Real? and Part 2: How Ritual Heals Trauma Stored in the Body and Passed Through Generations, I believe the elevated dead can be a source of support in our lives.

Let's explore the idea that not all your predecessors might be total assholes.

Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare Stories of Disconnection

I was speaking recently with a dear friend who is queer, kinky, radical, and has dedicated her work to supporting erotic freedom.

Over many decades, her parents never asked about her work, didn't care to know when she published books or offered much healing into the world.

Another dear elder in the sex education space said that his family wanted nothing to do with his gay liberation and erotic embodiment work.

As a result of their religious beliefs, his relationships with his siblings are superficial. He loves them, but they don't really know the beauty of this great man.

When my books were published, I told no one from my blood family in the generations behind me about my work.

I did tell my kids, with whom I've been able to disrupt the transgenerational patterns of silence.

The Grief of Disbelonging

When faced with the living family I know, my immediate question is: How on Earth did I land in the midst of this particular family?

How did my two queer friends and I emerge from bloodlines that do not support us, nor our work, in the least?

While this question may sound intellectual, let me provide more context.

Not being able to understand myself in the context of my ancestral lineages has had a harrowing somatic and emotional impact.

Of feeling deeply unmet and unheld by the very people supposed to love and accept you.

It's terribly lonely to be the misfit in your lineage.

The way I've come to belong to my ancestors is through who I am as a parent.

I look for belonging not in the past, but in how I show up now.

What I Know as a Parent I love and support my kids unconditionally to the best of my ability.

I heal the places in myself that need healing so I can be a good role model.

I apologize when I fuck up. I take accountability.

I pray for my children every day, for their good lives, their happiness, growth, prosperity, and health.

And I pray for their descendants.

I pray for those who did not come through my body, but are of my heart: students, clients, and trans kids.

Which is how I know that prayers have been said for me by those who came before.

Even when our parents, grandparents, or blood families could not show up, others in our lineages prayed for us.

Parenting draws me toward the future, and ancestral practices anchor me in the past.

Bypassing the Trouble

Let me reassure you that if you have a curiosity about your ancestors, or feel a call, but don't want to have to engage with all the muck, trauma, and dysfunction of living family, you don't have to.

My own ancestral reverence practice has taught me to circumvent the assholes.

There is no need to be in a relationship with spirits, embodied or not, who do not have respect or love for you.

You get to have a relationship with the elder ancestors who are well in spirit, who love you and only want the very best for you.

I go directly to the sources of goodness, kindness, and love in my ancestral lines, even if they lived generations back.

My queer, trans, witchy, radical, poetic, priestess, visionary clown self did not magickally incarnate with no context.

I come from gay uncles who penned poems at midnight, smoking furiously at their kitchen tables, and lesbian aunties who tended rose gardens like the beauty of their lives depended on it.

I am the descendant of trans and non-binary souls, those who walked between the worlds, deeply in relationship with Earth and Source, living at the village edge, casting spells and growing herb gardens, or who found solace in the monastery, their lives dedicated to the Divine.

The blood in my veins is from those who practiced pleasure, prayed to the River, and became students of a spider sitting in the center of her web.

Where are your true people?

Hidden in your bloodlines are those who resemble you.

You may never know their stories.

Genealogists don't have a special symbol to mark next to the really cool people.

But you must know, they were there.

They are still behind you, even if you don't see yourself represented in your recent family.

You come from:

the strange

the openhearted

the medicine makers

those who blurred the lines

those who loved more than one

the ones who stood up to oppression, in their hearts and bodies

the ones who had special relationships with animals

the ones who knew intimately what the flavors of wind meant

These rare gifts skip generations.

Sometimes ancestral gifts wait centuries, waiting for the right soul in which to unfurl their beauty.

Far downstream from their ancestral source, they manifest in you.

An Invitation

And so, if you, like my friends, feel disconnected from your family of origin, from your blood kin, I invite you to consider this idea:

You did not come from nowhere.

There are others in your lines, who you will never know, who not only prayed for you, but who were like you, in their times.

Some will come after you, who may look back at their bloodline, and long to feel met.

May you meet your descendants of blood and of heart now, with your prayers for them, and your uninhibited self-expression.

Say aloud to yourself and them, "I am here."

If you’re curious about building a relationship with ancestors who weren’t assholes, come tend the ones who prayed for you.

Tending the Bones is my 13-month ritual container for reclaiming love, pleasure, and belonging.

$100 Early bird discount available through Sept. 10.

Use Coupon Code TTB100

Explore Tending the Bones

Explore Tending the Bones

Replay: Tending the Bones Ancestral Ritual

Last night we gathered for an ancestral ritual and conversation about Tending the Bones.

In this session, I guide you through

a short ritual practice,

reflections on ancestral healing

live Q&A

And just a reminder:

Tomorrow Aug. 30 is the final day to register for Tending the Bones with the full $200 early bird discount.

After tomorrow, the discount drops to $100, and after Sept. 10 it will disappear completely.

Tending the Bones is a 13-month ritual container you can join anytime.

It supports you in reclaiming joy, embodiment, and choice in your intimate life through justice, somatics, and ancestral ritual.

"When I began, I identified as asexual from a place of fear. Now I feel an absolute wellspring of erotic energy — one I want to share with others and with myself."

-Water, New Mexico, TTB Graduate 2021

Register by tomorrow to save $200 Use Discount Code EarlybirdTTB200

Learn More about Tending the Bones

Last Chance | Free Ancestral Ritual | Register NOW

What: I am offering a free ritual honoring and connecting with your well, bright ancestors.

When: Tonight, Thursday Aug. 28 at 7 PM ET. Yes, it will be recorded.

If you have questions about my Tending the Bones 13-month ritual container to heal transgenerational sexual trauma, or any questions about the burdens and blessings of our ancestors sexuality, I invite you to join.

Register for Free

Photo by Adam Dutton

How Ritual Heals Trauma Stored in the Body and Passed Through Generations

Trauma in the Body, Ritual in the Bones

If you’ve ever felt a heaviness that doesn’t quite belong to you, this post might resonate.

When we work with ancestors, we are working with life expressed through generations, a lineage of time.

When we work with trauma, we are working with a mind-body that has gotten trapped in time. That stuckness gets passed down.

Trauma researcher Dr. Rob Baum writes: Trauma is an unwelcome guest lurking in the house, always present, a shadow in an open doorway, darkness at the corner of vision. There is a body that cannot be buried, because it is very much alive, but with an unendurable break, a tear in the fabric of time.

There has been much research on transgenerational trauma in the descendants of Holocaust survivors and other instances of profound cultural harm.

Through epigenetics, we know that the unresolved traumatic experiences of our forebearers impact our bodies and our DNA.

But not much has been studied about how to treat it.

What do you do with a heavy ancestral inheritance?

How do you treat sexual violence that your long-dead grandmother experienced that lives in you, negatively shaping your sexuality and relationships?

Much like the question of this recent post, “Are the ancestors real?” my work addresses a similar question:

Is this my ancestor’s trauma I experience in my body?Impacts of Ancestral Trauma on Sexuality

In terms of sexuality, I’d like to share a bit of the literature. Bear with me!

Researchers Devroede and Schutzenberger wrote about the somatic impact of unprocessed sexual abuse. They write:

The body remembers sexual abuse and keeping family secrets causes illness.

Unwittingly and unwillingly, our parents and grandparents and ancestors often leave us the legacy of their unfinished mourning, their “undigested” traumas, and the hidden shame of their secret family history.

Sexual abuse and other traumas experienced in the family’s past create insurmountable or unresolved emotional wounds that leave their mark on future generations.

If you’ve ever felt shame that doesn’t match your story, or fear around touch or intimacy that doesn’t quite make sense, it may be an ancestral inheritance.

The unresolved sexual trauma of our ancestors is a weight we may carry, in addition to our own wounds.

Sexual trauma can limit access to choice and free expression of sexuality.

When I was hearing stories in my office, listening to people name the impact of sexual trauma they experience that is not theirs—or is adjacent to theirs—I got curious. How could I help them heal?

This became my doctoral research.

I interviewed dozens of people across demographics.

I asked them how they experience transgenerational sexual trauma in their bodies and lives, and what had helped them heal.

They were quite articulate.

They named impacts like fear of sex, intimate partner violence, getting kicked out of the family home because of sexuality or pregnancy, shame, repression, and violation.

One person, a child of Holocaust survivors, said: “I do think that there is a repetition compulsion, and that kind of trauma is passed from generation to generation.”

According to therapist and sexologist Barnaby Barratt, repression of sexual expression leads to repression of our élan vital, less access to the healing resource of pleasure, and a restricted sense of who we are as erotic beings.

Barratt wrote:
The psychology of repression manifests as the inhibition of sensual and sexual expression... we see all around us people who have never danced naked in the sunlight, people who allow themselves to become severely deprived of touch, people who have never explored their genitals, people who have never laughed or cried with erotic exhilaration... repressed and inhibited, we soldier on, like the walking wounded.

Beyond Shame, Toward Gifts

Shame, repression, violence… but what’s the cure?

Something everyone I spoke with had was a relationship with their ancestors.

I wasn’t just researching the negative impacts of ancestral sexuality, but the positive blessings as well.

Many people named erotic gifts they had received through their lineages: queerness, pleasure-seeking, wildness, having healthy intimacy modeled for them, and access to embodiment.

Most of the people I spoke with were also carrying their own sexual trauma or complexities, and the ancestral piece was just one layer.

They described a range of practices: altars, singing to their ancestors, making different kinds of offerings, and invoking queer ancestors before hook-ups.

What I learned is that to heal transgenerational sexual trauma, you need transpersonal tools.

Individual tools like talk therapy aren’t enough.

Even somatics, as helpful as it is on the individual level, doesn’t fully address the symptoms we inherit from our ancestors.

Methodical, boundaried, ethical ritual—the kind that is well-held and effective—is the tool that has been used around the world, in traditional cultures, for as far back as I could find.

Photo by Greg Rakozy Ritual Heals

There are many instances across the literature, from many different cultures utilizing indigenous or shamanic healing practices, of the use of ritual for healing.

Scientific research supports that the use of transpersonal tools like ritual to address trauma is effective.

From child soldiers in Mozambique and Angola, to victims of war rape in Sierra Leone, to Australian Aboriginal people seeking to heal from forced attendance at boarding school and loss of culture, to supporting Native Americans with substance abuse issues, ritual is used to address trauma and transgenerational trauma.

Myron Eshowsky, a shamanic counselor and tender of international transgenerational trauma, wrote:

Healing transgenerational trauma requires the profound ability of symbolic ritual acts. They help to transform space, to communicate that which is invisible to our normal senses, to transform worldviews, identities and relationships.

Ritual acts can penetrate what often appears intransient and impenetrable in healing transgenerational trauma.

Ritual can overwhelm the defenses and convey complex messages, bringing a new consciousness, without saying a single word.

This is why I work with ritual.

It gives us a way to heal what words alone cannot.

It helps us stitch time back together, to integrate what happened in the past with our current lives, bodies, and relationships.

Ritual gives us a way to reclaim erotic freedom in the present.

Through ritual, we can lay down what was never ours, and inhabit fully our own sexual freedom.

Over the last ten years, I’ve noticed that many people are increasingly interested in relating with their ancestors.

I hope that in some small way, my work has contributed to that interest.

Bespoken Bones podcast was a labor of love. My book Tending the Bones, also written in deep service to personal and planetary healing.

My ritual container, also called Tending the Bones, has helped people reckon in their lineages and their bodies with sexual harm and violation, and opened doors to more erotic freedom and healthy relating.

To my knowledge, transgenerational sexual trauma has not been studied or treated this deeply in any other context.

If what I’ve written here lands for you, I’m sorry.

Perhaps it is time to address this layer of healing.

Lay down what was never yours.

Through ritual, we can stitch time back together and reclaim the freedom our ancestors could not.

Enter Tending the Bones, a container for healing and liberation.
✨ Save $200 with early bird pricing until Aug. 30.

Learn More about Tending the Bones

Are the Ancestors Real? A Somatic Guide to Reconnecting with Lineage

Are the Ancestors Real?

When I was spending a lot of time teaching about healing ancestors through somatic ritual, one of the questions I got all the time from my students was,

"How do I know the ancestors are real?"

Because I got that question so often, my teacher, Dr. Daniel Foor, helped me to develop a stock answer.

I would say,

"You did not grow up in a culture of ancestral reverence.

“Here in the West, we are disconnected from our lineages and our traditions.

“If you had grown up in a more intact culture, you would not think to ask that question because relating with your ancestors would have been woven into every day of your life.

“You would have made offerings, said their names, waited for dreams with information from your grandma.

“You would have had an ancestor altar in your home.

“You would have sung and prayed to them automatically, because that's what everyone around you did.

“I'm so sorry you did not get that.

“However, you can have that now.

“Ancestors are a human energy, and humans are relational.

“You can build a relationship with your ancestors just like with any other human. With care and attention over time.

“Start small.

“Make an offering and see what happens.

“Then take it a step further."

What is Ancestral Healing?

If my student was still listening and interested, I'd take it to the next level.

"There are many layers to healing, and ancestral healing is one layer.

“Getting reconnected with your well, bright, and elevated ancestors is your birthright.

“In many cultures, the shining ancestors are actively involved with their living descendants, offering advice, intuition, prayer, guidance, and love.

“Think about it, don't you want the very best for any descendants of heart or of blood that you have?

“Wouldn't you say prayers for their highest good and best possible lives?

“Your ancestors did the same for you, even if very far back."

Western Doubt

Anthropologists have noted that the question itself is a Western one.

Twentieth-century Western researchers were challenged to apply cultural relativism when faced with ancestor-worshipping cultures.

Some avoided the question altogether by focusing on what a culture believes.

In Family Constellations work, there is disagreement too, with some practitioners believing that ancestors truly exist, and some believing they are more like archetypes.

Francesca M. Boring, a Shoshone medicine woman and Family Constellation practitioner, said it directly:

“The Ancestors are real. Unlike the interpretation of constructivist constellations which may relegate Ancestors to allegory or metaphor, the Ancestors are viewed simply as ancestors.”

Photo by Bryan Goff A Personal Metaphysics

But Western minds need proof, not faith. We often come to faith through having positive experiences we cannot explain.

Stephen Jay Gould once said,

“Each of us has to have a personal metaphysics. There are questions that are formally unanswerable on which nonetheless every individual must take a position in order to integrate various pieces of his life.”

My Experience

I would say,

"Hey, you can always try it out and see what results you get.

“I know personally that when I engaged authentically in healing work with my ancestral lineages, my life dramatically improved in unexpected ways.

“Was that my ancestors?

“I believe so, but ultimately it does not matter to me if ancestral relationships are scientifically measurable.

“I feel more wholeness, more integral aliveness, because I am in good relationship with my ancestors.

“Because I know I have done the ritual work within my power to clean up any unresolved trauma and harm my ancestors experienced and/or committed.

“As a white person living in the so-called USA, that matters to me."

Looking Ahead

When we are working with ancestors, we are working with life expressed through generations, a lineage of time.

When we work with trauma, we work with a mind-body that has gotten trapped in time.

That stuckness gets passed down.

This is the threshold where my doctoral research on transgenerational sexual trauma began.

In Part Two of this post, I will share what I learned about the impacts of ancestral trauma on sexuality and how ritual helps us transform what has been passed to us.

My book “Tending the Bones” grew out of this research, and my ritual container Tending the Bones is open now for anyone ready to engage these questions in their own lineages and bodies. $200 Early Bird Discount until Aug. 30

Learn More and Join

Last Chance to Play with Camp LightHeart

If you’ve been meaning to join Camp LightHeart, this is your moment. Rosy Delight—our final week—is about to begin.

We’ll be exploring roses as a form of pleasure medicine and ancestral connection, and softening into beauty as a way to stay alive amidst chaos.

Roses are such an important ally in my life, reminding me to stay focused on beauty.

We start Monday, July 28 @ 7 PM Eastern.

I hope you'll join!

Register and Come Smell the Roses