“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

– Audre Lorde

It can be so easy to believe that it all depends upon the purity of the vessel holding the information. That passing through our inevitably nicked, dinged and pocked passageways will taint and bastardize the message enough to render it useless. That student and teacher are not the same.

I arrive frayed and frazzled. Sometimes so hot, from having been in a car cooked in the blazing sun, or so cold from having to brush the snow off with my bare hands as I never seem to have the scrapey thing when I need it.

Almost always, I am tired.

So are they. And anxious and scared and sad. The overly thin woman, the one they call ‘boss’, who is so tightly wound that, in another set of clothes, she could easily be mistaken for a meth addict.

The man who cannot look directly at me, so unused to women as anything other than sex objects. The receptionist, whose full body embarrasses her, and whose courage at coming, nonetheless, unlocks the first layer of my armor.

Although it can be so hard, fraught with all the fear and insecurity one can imagine, I must open the large heavy door in the center of my chest and let myself be filled by the Universe. I never mention Her name. Instead, I talk about chakras and nadis and meridians, about the shape of bones and physiology of breath. My inability to tell jokes vanishes, and we all laugh, that forceful movement of air like a feather duster, cleaning out what is old and stuck and no longer belongs.

Wariness and weariness become wonder.

Binds dissolve and edges soften, until we are all larvae, waiting for Her instructions to grow our wings and fly, each of the dents and bruises forming the beautiful markings that make us distinct and magnificent.

And there I want to linger… in that space, where damage becomes divinity, where my breath and your breath are one, where there is no longer any need for the fear of not being perfect.