compassion...

as a child I learned the world was fashioned of violent threat and masked neglect. my strictest material needs would get address, but my unique emotional reality was obliterated each time I had to betray justified responses to my environment. I learned that crying was not welcome and so became noted for my silence, which came naturally to me in any case. I didn't learn to cry until almost three. Then I learned that when someone I loved and relied on did me a violence, my ability to recompose and press on with work drew admiration from my abuser, my mother. I equated her admiration with my personal safety and with being loved, so I worked hard to cultivate her admiration and this included a tacit agreement to accept her discharges of violence without calling for an intervention of justice. she admired me most when I complied with her need to see me mirror her own poorly-differentiated self. she had my hair cut short and permed like her own and made duplicates of her outfits for me to wear. where a child could be left to blossom a sense of self, I was silenced, erased. when I could take no more pressure and found myself talking back the beatings were even more spectacular. I learned that protecting myself from being snuffed out as an individual was dangerous. I live with the given that to express myself with full vulnerability as to my emotional and distinguishing needs is dangerous, that something 'terrible' will happen to me. I've brought this lens into materiality as I dance with cancer and other mortal threats of life in the world.

there must be a way beyond the imprints of early adverse experience and the intensely selfreflexive and complex world of suffering it gives rise to... the metalogic of tibetan buddhism lends the tools and teachings on how to emancipate oneself but there are many roads to rome. the very fact of awareness is positive and very comforting to me in the here and now. i think of the millions of other people struggling with chronic fear. If I can disentangle from neurotic response and like an explorer putting up emblems of venture in unknown territory, try on fresh ways of being, I'll be continuing in the spirit of transformation that catalyzed with my diagnosis.

• The journey of life is the unification of fragmentation. Fragments are units of power that are out of control. We make agreements to come and collect ourselves.

In the spirit of changing the momentum of this wound we transmit for healing down through the ages...