When Your Hands Shake
#031 Synchronicity and Somatic Wisdom
Dearest Reader,
What a day I’ve had! April 9, 2025 is a day that will go down in my personal history as a complete what-the-actual…
For three days now all I’ve wanted was a really good cup of hot chocolate. The first attempt, at a Mexican restaurant, left tiny pearled bits of chocolate at the bottom of the cup, which was visually dissatisfying (I didn’t get to eat the bits!). The second day at a burger joint (I know…) which promised chantilly, did not deliver the chantilly. Months ago they gave me this beauty (image below) and I wanted it again (big sigh):
And the third day? April 9, 2025 on my way to get some 100% satisfying drinking chocolate I scurry through my bag and wonder, where is my wallet?
Ten minutes prior I’d just exited a yellow bus, where I last used my wallet. The bus route required I get off and get back on, and the driver had me pay twice, which I remember thinking was stupid. Then I sat at the back, waiting for my stop to catch the transfer ride.
I recognized that maybe my wallet never made it back into my bag? Sat on my lap and slipped to the floor when I stood?
Passionately optimistic, I decided to wait outside under the sun for the exact same bus to return, hopeful to search it for a chance that humanity would be on the side of ‘caring for the other’. While in wait, something somatic and gnarly happened within my body that sent me down an anthropological tunnel—and I want to share it with you in today’s piece.
On April 8 I published this article—In the Era of Chaos, Be Cunning—through CoAuthored, where I’ve been allowed to flex the absurdities of my inner world. In the article I talk about how we humans require a shift, in what Hanzi Freinacht deems, becoming dividuals of influence, people who care for others—in a holistic way. In a way that is not superficial, but in a deeply caring way.
In the preparation for sharing that article, I read several stories including one by another writer-comedian
who I took a workshop from about a year ago. I was so moved by Alex’s piece that I left a comment and went about my day.And then? Well, you already know what happened the next day. My wallet and I became separated and there I sat outside wondering if I was about to have to walk four hours home. Or if my wallet was going to make its way back to me.
I waited for forty or so minutes when a similar bus—one with the exact same bus number—arrived. I bolted onto it via the backdoor, searched—aware that it was not the same bus that I rode, and when I made my way to sit back down outside to continue waiting for my bus, something inside me collapsed several moments later.
Somatically, I felt my stomach drop, like the center of me became hollow. Then my hands started shaking uncontrollably. I sensed that it was a full-on negative feeling. I started talking to my body—please, please, I need you to please keep it together right now.
Since beginning somatic therapy over half a decade ago, I do this now. I pay attention to these signals and I do my best to intuit what is being communicated. In the moment I had no idea. But I knew that it was time to call my bank, and turn off access to my cards. It was time to call the bus management folks too.
Then, oblivious to the somatic message—I sat under the sun another hour until the bus driver I rode with finally appeared. Again, I stood, bolted to the back door, searched (while he honked the horn for me to get off his bus) and asked the bus driver if my wallet had been returned.
Nothing.
Once I made it home—by taking a very calculated risk to turn my bank card back on so that I could use the ride share service app—I called my bank. They said it would be best to file a police report. So I walked for another hour to the police station only to find out that Alex Dobrenko wrote a fictional story about me going to the police station that same day.
Too eerie!
But after a long talk with the far and distant-ancestors, filing the report, catching a beautiful sunset, and easing into a turkey sandwich for dinner, I recognized that the somatic shakiness and stomach drop was proof of the interconnectedness of our world.
The Psycho-Spiritual Take Away
I’ve gone to the bank now, and they’ve given me a new card. I’ve got a new ID on the way, a couple of other cards will be on the way soon too, and my finances weren’t compromised. But guess what else?
On the way to the police station I looked down on the walkway and saw a bill. It would be the equivalent of a $10 bill. It was also folded up exactly like the bill I’d left in my wallet. No I am not saying it was that bill from my wallet… But in looking just like what I’d lost, it absolutely gave me pause.
Once I lost my wallet, I kept thinking something was terribly wrong for such a terrible thing to happen just when I needed my IDs and cards. Just last week my phone was swallowed up by the Ocean, and it took three days of being super careful to find repair folks who would save it from the sea salt—notorious for ruining electronics.
But the bill on the ground felt like a wink. A synchronistic wink to point me to recognize two things. Somatology and Spiritual hygiene.
Somatology—the discourse on, study of, and theories about the (human) body. I am now roaming the internet obsessed about Indigenous somatic knowledge because it is highly plausible that the moment in which my body became hollow and my hands began to shake, was the moment that someone found my wallet. Saw my face on my ID cards. Saw multiple credit cards. And believed they were going to have a party at my expense.
An excerpt from Becoming Animal helps to anchor this:
We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because - by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism - we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. We can feel the tangible textures, sounds and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight. Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh. We are neither pure spirits nor pure minds, but are sensitive and sentient bodies able to be seen, heard, tasted, touched by all the beings around us. - David Abram
Spiritual hygiene. I have recently angered people, not because I was unkind or rude, but when you are exercising sacred rage, those on the other end will not play nice. Religions have a strong emphasis on this sort of hygiene through prayer, purification, fasting, requests of protection, guidance. In spirituality, much of the memory and practices have been severed from my family. So, my path involves relearning ways of cultivating this hygiene, and reciprocity too.
In the month of March, I had been told twice to tend to my spiritual hygiene by the practitioner I’ve now sat with a few times. I’d missed some steps, and now I know that with all that had been surfacing, I needed scrub a bit harder. And I’m okay taking in that I was hard-headed. I needed to be more diligent.
So, just before it was finally time to sleep, I read that fictional story of myself, and then I saw grandparents trying to play a collaborative game and fail—my night ended in cackling laughter. A night in which I was appreciative of my body’s communication and of the lesson I most certainly need to take with me.
Thank you so much for reading and for bringing your presence here 🧁.
P.S. If you’d like a little extra reading and didn’t catch this article I wrote a few weeks back, I also loved writing it and I’m thrilled to share it.
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Very interesting and entertaining albeit at your expense, I suppose. I have experienced similar events that are spooky but ...I call it intuition I suppose. Or that's how I've explained it. I am glad you did not lose any money...thx for sharing. You are my 99th story...:)
Sacred rage! That's an amazing concept. I'm pondering that today... Thank you, Danver.