Our Material

Expanding Capacities in 2026

I am conflicted about New Year’s resolutions. As someone often obsessed with more self-improvement habits than I can keep up with, I am eager for an opportunity to refine or start again. And as someone who often feels dogged by her own scrutiny, I also want to find ways to ease up, lay off, and simply accept myself and reality on their own terms.

I offer up this piece as a musing, a mulling over this polarity, in the first week of a(nother) new year. May it be a good one, a capacious one.

And if you are in the mood for one-on-one mentorship, I am opening one up this month: January 25-February 15 :)

At the root of my early yoga practice was an underlying belief that if I didn’t work hard on myself, my deep inner badness would be revealed. It could destroy me and everyone around me. Like many survivors of abuse, I had internalized the badness of what I had experienced and claimed it as my own. Working on myself was a way to keep carrying the bag of shame and blame- that baggage train that keeps going.

I came to practice with a body I believed was dirty. Not just metaphorically dirty—actually contaminated, polluted, wrong. I hoped yoga offered purification if done correctly. I wanted to be purged, exorcised, and relieved of my suffering in a way that felt familiarly feminine— through aggression towards my body, through the commitment, intensity, and endurance I was accustomed to from dance training. I was sure that if I worked hard enough, long enough, controlled my appetites and mastered my flesh, I could become clean.

I didn’t know yet that I had simply found new tools for the same work. That violence could dress itself in healing and still be violence.

TOXIC THEOLOGIES

Mastery is trending. Of what and towards what end?

Even in the “wellness space,” many of the models are based on stale, if not downright anti-body, pro-capitalist lingo such as “detox” and “mastery.” What is so dirty about living? And if life is so dirty, what is the opposite? What is implied by the concept of detox? So one goes on such-and-such a program to “eat clean,” and then the rest of life is eating… what?

In preparing a proposal for my (new! improved! wink wink) breath book, I read a forward to a comparative title. The contributor notes that “70 percent of the toxins inside our bodies are removed through our lungs.”[1] Okay, so we exhale “toxins.” What does he suppose happens when we inhale again?

The socio-theological premise of this reasoning maps all too organically (read, habitually) onto bodies as racialized and gendered sites of primitivity. The old Cartesian architecture holds: mind hovers, pristine and discrete, while mucky matter loiters below, requiring constant surveillance. Bodies—some bodies more than others—become the site where pollution threatens. Appetites must be guarded, drives disciplined, coarseness smoothed, lest we collapse back into the originary ooze of the maternal surround.

Bodies imagined as toxic are not random; they map onto older architectures of who is deemed clean, who must be purified, and who carries contamination simply by existing. Women’s bodies. Trans bodies. Brown and Black bodies. Queer bodies. Big bodies. Disabled bodies. Flesh marked as too much.

Detox sells because purity has always needed something to expel. The concept of a clean body requires the concept of a dirty one. But living bodies are not clean; they leak, emit, and then absorb what they just expelled. By definition, all that is living is ephemeral, fresh, and ripe on its way to fetid. What happens when we place our juicy organic flesh into this system of categorization, this binary of pure/polluted?

PURELY FOR PROFIT

The wellness industry is a perpetual motion machine fueled by our perception of failure to master. It’s the state of lack, fundamental to living in a post-Edenic world- a world in which something is missing, lost, and desperately desired. In fact, lack is the mother of desire. Lack is the state of living (you can get down with Jacques Lacan for more along those lines). If we could actually arrive at that sought state of wholeness—if mastery were achievable—markets would collapse. The wellness model requires that you never get clean enough. There is always the next cleanse, the next program, the next level of optimization to purchase. The next year to resolve to be harder, better, faster, stronger (thanks, Kanye.)

We are starting to understand how eating disorders shapeshift into obsessions with “clean” eating, how yoga becomes punishment dressed as practice.[6] Self-loathing learns to speak the language of self-care. The narratives most readily available are medical or mechanical, reflecting layered imperatives infused with submerged cultural values we might think of as “healthism”—the production of the healthy body as moral achievement.

Restrict, purge, perfect. Green juice, White Tantra and Breath of Fire to burn it all. My asceticisms were my armor. They held me tightly, contained me enough to keep the feeling of badness at bay. But I had to keep going, keep seeking, trying to outrun a condition that was terminal- the fact that life is embodied, and all the everything happens right here.

What would happen if I stopped running from the fact of having a body at all?

EMBODY-NESS

Embodied practices live where bodies do- loitering in sites of in-between-ness, locations in which we might renegotiate subject/object relations. We are less discrete than we mythologize ourselves to be.

Consider: psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s work on intersubjectivity shows how two subjectivities must engage in mutual recognition to become subjects at all.[8] Or Teresa Brennan’s mapping of affective transmission—the way one person’s emotional state can be directly absorbed into another’s physiology.[9] We really do move each other. Recognition isn’t a metaphor– it’s a material exchange. Intergenerational affects accrete in the body. The membrane between self and other is not a wall. It’s a site of constant negotiation, of transmission, of what gets let in and what gets kept out and how do we know the difference when the very act of breathing means taking the world into ourselves and expelling ourselves into the world?

How do we guard against contamination when breathing itself means exchange? When the boundary between self and other dissolves with every inhale?

The mess of it all is not a problem to solve; it is the condition we are already in. For me, the practice is recognizing the shape I am in, and then choosing to put myself in a position —a position that can experience glee and mourning, and bear existential and quotidien anxieties—not biohacks for optimal performance.

So in the yoga room, I don’t imagine myself transferring clean technique into contaminated vessels. I work with internal cartographies as palimpsests—the meridians, the lo shu, the chakra system, the tree of life—topographies through which we might hold presence and direct experience of (sometimes) psychic cohesion in an always-vulnerable body, living within the context of mortality. I enter into relation with organisms that are already complete, already intelligent, already in constant communication with their environments. The teacher/student dyad becomes a site of mutual recognition. Subjectivity cultivated through friction and simultaneity- for living, not for conquering life.

GOING VIRAL

“Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” —Adam Phillips

How much life can we tolerate?

Your body is 100 trillion cells. Only about 1/10th of that is human. You are a material landscape of alterity.[7]

The rest are natural immigrants: 500 species of bacteria living in your gut (that’s 3.3 pounds of you that is not you), 80 genera of fungus on your skin, herpes loitering in the sacral nerve cells, demodex mites in your eyelash follicles eating and fucking and shitting and dying and practicing their minor magicks. Strep cells on our teeth, 300-500 cells thick. Athlete’s foot moves between feet, shuffles in communal showers, creeps under toenails. One trillion bacteria make the skin home.

And then there’s the biological dark matter—40-50% of the gut, 20% of what’s in the nose—not plant, not fungus, not animal, not virus, not bacteria. We don’t know what we are made from. We don’t know.

The we-don’t-know belongs in us and on us and to us. They are us. What are us? In an ongoing interspecies ecology in which you are a participant, not a sovereign, what does mastery even mean?

THE PRACTICE OF CAPACITY

What if instead of mastery, we cultivated capacity? Capacity is not control. Capacity is how much you can hold without needing to expel it, how much complexity you can tolerate in a body that is 43% human and 57% other?

Feminist physicist Karen Barad’s “agential realism” suggests we focus on the phenomena of subject/object entanglement rather than separation.[10] Matter and meaning are never actually distinct. Boundaries are not walls but sites of intra-action—places where things become themselves through relation rather than isolation.

Matter has been made to mean something specific, though. Passive. Mortal. Feminine. The concept of “woman” gets symbolically enmeshed with notions of primitivity, with “nature,” with the body as a site of contamination.[11] Materiality itself is suspect.

But what’s the matter with matter? Yes, we are material. Mortal. Fermenting and putrefying and, embarrassingly, persistently alive. Let’s arrive more fully into the flesh of it. To increase our capacity to fuck with the microbial, the ephemeral, the composting fact of having a body that is also having us.

John Cage said, “Nothing is more sacred than any other thing. We should wash our dishes and brush our teeth, and forget about one thing being sacred and another not.” So let’s keep it sacred, meaty, and capacious. Let’s fatten a sensibility of tenderness, and reinvest in the tingling, terrifying feeling of being alive.

---

NOTES

[1] This quote is representative of common wellness industry rhetoric around breathwork and detoxification, found across numerous popular breathing manuals and retreat marketing materials.

[2] For the foundational articulation of mind/body dualism, see René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). For feminist critiques of this dualism and its gendered implications, see Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987) and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

[3] On the racialization of the body as primitive and polluted, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). On fat bodies and moral panic, see Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (New York: NYU Press, 2019).

[4] On purity culture and contemporary wellness, see Jessica Calarco and Kate Cairns, “The Moral Economy of Motherhood,” in Intensive Mothering: The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Motherhood, ed. Linda Rose Ennis (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2014); and Christy Harrison, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2019).

[5] On the wellness industry’s business model, see Carl Cederström and André Spicer, The Wellness Syndrome (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015) and Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (New York: Twelve, 2018).

[6] On orthorexia and “clean eating” as eating disorder, see Steven Bratman and David Knight, Health Food Junkies: Orthorexia Nervosa: Overcoming the Obsession with Healthful Eating (New York: Broadway Books, 2000).

[7] On the human microbiome and the ratio of human to microbial cells, see Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo, “Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,” PLOS Biology 14, no. 8 (2016): e1002533. For broader implications, see Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (New York: Ecco, 2016).

[8] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

[9] Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

[10] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

[11] On the symbolic association of women with matter, nature, and primitivity, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011 [1949]); Sherry Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (1972): 5–31; and Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[12] Lawrence Millman, “Fungal Charisma,” in The Kingdom of Fungi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).