THE POWER OF MEOW by Hamsa Fae

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  • February 20, 2025

THE POWER OF MEOW by Hamsa Fae

Meow when you don’t know. Meow to greet a stranger. Meow when the playing gets hard. It’s the OM equivalent in another dimension. Now do it again but exaggerate your mouth. One more time but make it slower. Throat to diaphragm to pelvis, the vagus nerve spirals. Can you hear all the vowels, each seed conspiring to create your vocal signature? 

Everything is vibrating around me. Each object has some sort of synchronicity to help me remember the layers of my subconscious. The nonsense and the random are all playgrounds for liminal space. My voice teaches me to shapeshift, code switch. My coffee order voice. The voice I use for my crush. The grunts and groans of pain and fatigue. My voice is also a social contract. How high/low must it sound to subscribe to some sort of post-colonial idea of gender. This voice is a place of in-between-ness. Saddle up.

Energetic and Vocal Architecture Quick-Guide: 

ee/ throat chakra/ether
ey/ heart chakra/air
ah/ solar plexus/fire
oo/ sacral chakra/water
oh/ root chakra/earth

  1. Set an intention, “what am I reclaiming today?”
  2. Tone down these vowels in one breath cycle to ground. Continue nine times, and if you lose count, start back at zero. Can you feel the resonance of each seed sound in the correlating center till it hits the rectum? Perfect for after a night out. 
  3. Tone up these vowels to energize anytime of the day. How does heat or energy start to move after expressing? When you reach the top, how does your third eye antennae whip around to find center? Stim this while waiting in line, driving, or staring at a wall. 
  4. Which vowels are challenging/easeful to vibrate? The pudding is in the permission. Unlock that jaw, baby. It’s time to show teeth, tongue, and tonsils to explore the void of each center. 
  5. Re-call the four beat body drumming (left thigh, right thigh, chest, clap). Give a vowel for each point of contact. Continue until the rhythm takes you. This practice is a place for failure and fun. 
  6. Watch the rebound of energy. Pretend like nothing happened and drink some water. 

What is most alive during integration is watching my intentions of child-like wonder, pushing through the domestication of my daily routine lately. I found a eucalyptus grove near my home and danced for the nymphs. The dappled light through the trees was a nice touch. The crunch of all flammable bark. Seducing the invasive, I say. Piscean princess is on her way! 

The Zoom portal is a ceremony space. Aphrodite works in tech. The faeries are conspiring every code and cog to spin the wheels of our intentions. When one of our participants said, “can we try it with all our microphones on”, mute be gone. It was such a shift to experience the chambers of community within lag. Call and response is now a symphony, never ending waves until silence sits us in the rebound. I wonder about how our intentions will butterfly effect into the next moment, towards the next stepping stone to the lotus. I question, what is the lotus moment I am envisioning? A springtime bloom. Freedom. Something like the dream I had last night – three baby horses cuddling me in all directions.

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This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.

We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​