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People who say they have no expectations, and are “okay with everything” are often the ones with the most unsaid expectations. It’s so unsaid that even they are often unaware of how much and what they actually expect from themselves + others. These are the people who have hidden resentments building up, and they may or may not have any knowledge of it. How do you know? Try crossing them in any way. They are the ones who will say/think, years or months later, “I did so much for that person”,
Or, “I never once said or did anything bad and yet that person did this to me.” Here they are unaware that they have a CLEAR expectation that they will do xyz and get abc. But they will be stuck in thinking of themselves as “without needs/demands/expectations”.
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On the other hand, the people who voice their expectations and hold themselves and others accountable to them are often the easiest the deal with. You know what they are about and you know what you’re going to get if you do a, b or c. These people often get labelled as demanding but are often the least demanding on the scale of demanding humans, of which we are all a part.

#humanbehaviourisfascinating #expectations #relationships

What a powerful panel on Connection/Disconnection in the field of Art Therapy and Mental Health. Thank you Rumi Clinton, Beth Enterkin, Nerissa Osby and Leah Amaral for participating, sharing, engaging in such a wholesome manner.

Some questions that were spoken to:
– What does a decolonial art therapy practice look like to you?
– How does one navigate conflict in work/education settings when one is training as an art therapist?
– Do politics and mental health intersect for you?
– Speaking from an intersectional lens, what are your experiences of mental health practice?
– What are your personal resources that sustain you during times of disconnection?

#artofconnection #arttherapy #arttherapyispoliticalpersonal #panel #saic#saicpics @ SAIC Sullivan Galleries

Today, a woman who said she found me attractive, in a queer party asked me if she could watch me dance as we were all dancing. She said if I said no, she would understand and not engage in the act of looking, because she wanted to ensure I didn’t feel uncomfortable under her direct gaze.
I was so moved by her unexpected and staggeringly surprising utilization of consent in what could be seen as an obvious “invitation to look”- the act of dancing, that I became teary eyed with pleasant surprise.
For survivors of sexual assault and for everyone else who reads the news, every act of stripping away of power of the self through rape and acts of “powering over” others, may feel like the “norm”. “Boys will be boys and it’s in our nature to objectify people.” “Who asks for permission when they are fucking?” Statements like these are present and normalized everywhere.
But.
But there are spaces where people not only actively acknowledge that we live in a culture of rape, but actually put in concrete actions to ensure that we end rape culture. There are people out there who WANT to make you feel safe so they can ensure you enjoy yourself. Not need to, or being forced to, to fit the box of a “good person” but believe me, they actually want to make sure they are not harming you. There are people out there who DON’T think that saying the words “May I kiss you?” before kissing someone is an abnormal thing. There are people who say, “I want to touch you like this, but if it doesn’t feel good, just tell me, I’ll stop.” There are people like that. And if you, the one who is reading this post, isn’t one, it’s high time perhaps you changed.
Intimacy with someone who asks before they act heals so many trauma-wounds. And oh, it is so sexy.

US centric academia, US centric food, US centric music, US centric porn, US centric clothes, US centric social justice… Oh goodness, it gets so tiring. Studying the practice of therapy, sociology, anthropology, or anything slightly related to “culture” in the US is such a dissociative experience. You have to not only adapt to US supremacy within your own neurobiology to place all the psychotherapeutic learning you’re embodying, but also erase a whole part of the fact that you belong to an entirely different land where therapy practice, people’s inner narratives, attachment styles and cultural propaganda that manifests in the psyche, are performed within a completely different sensibility. Who is going to understand, in your foreign classroom the nuances of an intercaste parent-child relationship living in suburban Kerala and that they aren’t necessarily “enmeshed” because they live together well into their 40s? The term enmeshment itself is studied from a western-centric lens and it guides the narrative of so much that we consume. Yet, this place defines how much bread I can earn, how much value other people see in me, in my home country, as someone educated in its narratives.

I hesitate to be,
one of those who sit outside
the lines of reality,
yet comments on what happens
inside the box I sometimes 
call home.
Somehow Indians and Pakistanis
have the best allyship outside that
boundary when emotions run high.
Yesterday I spent the evening in
quick conversation
with a familiar auntie
who I’ve never spoken to before,
buying atta
at the Indian-Pakistani grocery store
on the corner of Devon.
We sighed together,
zipping our carts around,
in quiet companionship
searching frantically for food
that didn’t reek of white,
amidst a musty stack of all things brown
conversing in robust hindi-punjabi
about spices and daal
and the media and fake news,
all in one,
she wearing a green patiala,
me in my dress,
and silver nosering
until she reached for Tapal Danedar
and I for Brooke Bond Red Label
and she asked me if I wasn’t from Karachi
I shook my head and we continued to talk
about the media
and the fake news
and our prime ministers,
and how we both
have lost blood.

Endings don’t mean much to me, it’s all an ongoing path…the end and the beginning are both one.

Here’s to more questioning, more facing on conflict, better relational tools and hence, a deeper dive into this fantastic existence.

An article on better resolution tools on this gift called “conflict” that we run away from:

http://www.jaysongaddis.com/how-to-resolve-conflict-in-your-relationships/

Sweltering red rock.
Watermelon slices outside prison, waiting to dissolve in the succulent juices of an April summer.
April is always a month of insights. Last April, a clear, spiritual focus found me. I always knew it was coming, but sometimes its the dazy heat of April that quietens the mind, and tells you it is time.

Suffering. Memory.
Memory, play, repeat.
I was walking, walking fast, walking calm,
Walking slow and focused- staring at the weary faces of the women waiting for me to shell out my ‘peace games’ and ‘art therapy kit’, I was reminded of my ex-partner-a gentle guy who ended up threatening to wring my neck in our last fight. A small gesture, a maddening anger. Pain bubbles as sadness mirrors- everyone is suffering.
Did I give in?
Does love resolve itself? Does time resolve pain?

Khula Aasman is a beautiful, earthy space for artists right in the middle of Chembur in Mumbai. With their focus being ‘Play for Peace’, they work whole heartedly in the realm of community based therapeutic art work, facilitated over long periods of time. They’d invited me over to do a ten-hour, two-week spanning therapeutic engagement with the women-at-risk. The focus was for it to be a community mural- with their ideas, stories and representations of truth.

Check them out here!