(In english, pronounce it “lôr”, like folklore.)
I’m curious about the sense of what’s true, that mad laughter of sparkling cellular respiration amidst and beyond anything material. My body is so much more than I ever thought was possible. Life is so much shorter than I could possibly conceive. I sit upon the confluence of rivers, meetings, joinings, that make this all possible. Joy is the root of it all.
At the age of 5, I was diagnosed with a rare bleeding disorder, Immune Thrombocytopenia (ITP), and told this was a condition of unknown origin in which the body is at risk of hemmorhage.
My occluded right eye does not see, but it maintains a sensitivity to my environment. It feels the wind on a cold winter day and the warmth of direct sunlight like exposed skin. It demanded that I take breaks from staring into the world and learn other ways of understanding. It taught me to trust the sensation of flows within my body as proof of life.
I spent my youth transiting in and out of hospitals. I became a case. I’ve written publicly about these experiences. My body was a black box, and my veins were Schrödinger’s cat. I was kept going with intravenous immunoglobulin, a product prepared from the pooled serum of thousands of unknown donors. I carried a laundry list of medications but was never offered a handout on how to live in a body that hurt. The medical system kept me alive, and I am deeply grateful for that technology, but it treated my biology while ignoring the context.
The pivot happened in 2019. A series of meetings brought me to a dance studio and the practices of Contact Improvisation and Taiji.
For the first time, I wasn’t fighting gravity; I was collaborating with it. I realized then that my “useless” blind eye was actually my first teacher of somatic awareness. It does not see light, but it feels. It registers air pressure, warmth, and the proximity of others. It taught me that we can navigate the world by sensing the shift in density rather than just scanning the surface.
Contact improvisation shows me that joy is the root of it all. I can surrended in that spiral momentum, I can let go at al times, in all places. I’ve found that a sore body beats a sore mind any day of the year. I’ll choose tired muscles and a calm spirit over high-strung thinking and pent-up energy. There is so much chaos, so much anger, so much distrust. Best to let it be, and focus instead on play and wonder.
My work today is the vessel I wish I had been offered. I am cultivating the capacity to remaining steady in dynamic readiness, and to share that skill with others. Allowing everything to change, for there is no use in resisting the shifts, tectonic, of the spheres’ music. Hope, active and alive, is all I know and all I’ve known.
I am not interested in becoming a wellness influencer. I do not stand above anyone as an expert on how to find health. I am a practitioner who is learning the terrain by walking it.
The hands-on, in person practices — tuina, marma craniosacral work — is hands-on, structural, and slow. It takes place in Montréal and involves following the body’s own impulses in gravity until something resolves.
The remote bodywork is a matter of reading your constitutional pattern, mapping imbalance, and building an approach to how you eat, sleep, move, and rest that respects the intelligence of your particular ecology. These are two registers of a single inquiry: how to inhabit a body that has been through difficult weather.
My daily practice supports the work. I practice qigong — a method of internal hygiene, a way of discovering and regulating the current of vitality that connects the body to the wider ecology. My foundational training took place at the Montreal Gongfu Research Center. My inquiry has been further shaped by the practices handed down to me by Mata Amritanandamayi Devi. Though she uses the language of Hinduism, I find each day that the teachings of Sanatana Dharma are resonant with the truths of every culture I have encountered.
Can we speculate on selves that are not the images engraved in bone? The ivory tower illusion of right and wrong, surfacing in the drip, drip, drip, the fluid inscriptions upon the psyche.
Autoimmunity is a recalibration, a warning. It is the body in revolt against global poisoning. I realized that if my body cannot hold its toxic blood, it is because the rivers of earth have been poisoned. Health is svastha स्वस्थ, becoming established in self-knowledge. No pristine state to be achieved, fixed identity to hold onto, or commodity to consume. Healing is an ecology of presence. I stopped treating my body as the enemy. It is my vessel, my teacher, and my most intimate companion.
I place faith at the center of my life, but I am not a preacher. I feel it is within reach to neither grasp nor strive for what is simple and always here. I learned that no amount of aggression toward my own physiology will bring me home.
In 2024, I self-published a memoir which tells the story of my childhood and young adulthood in raw prose-poetry-essay. You can learn about Auto-Immune Heresy: A Memoir, and order it here.
I write about all of this at autoimmunetheory.com — autoimmunity, ecology, the body, what it means to navigate a condition that doesn’t resolve.
