Sovereign Body

Resurrecting the Sovereign Creatress

My first gallbladder attack arrived in the middle of a situation I didn’t yet have the clarity to name.

I was navigating a power dynamic with someone who had occupied the triple role of healer, mentor, and friend — the kind of entanglement where the will of another and that of self blur at their edges until the body draws a distinction the psyche hasn’t yet to name. The liver, seat of our authority and clarity of sight, the organ whose emotion is anger — she named it first. She always does.

Sacred Rage vs. Inflammatory Anger

Last spring I was in Antigua, Guatemala — a city literally fortified around volcanic activity — working with a somatic therapist I would begin referring to as my “Anger Doula.” From his perspective, I didn’t know how to skillfully work with my anger. He wasn’t wrong. Years of repression, contortion and the real felt sense healthy expression wasn’t safe had my body in loops of inflammation.

Spring is liver season. The wood element. Renewal, growth, the constancy of life insisting on itself through fallow soil. It’s also paired with the emotion of anger, which I think is so wise of nature to ask of us to first clarify our boundaries, where we place our life force energy.

What I have come to realize is renewal and rage are two sides of the same coin- we cannot have one without metabolizing the other. Yet most of us were never taught the difference between sacred rage and inflammatory anger, or how to support either. Which means we never learned that they are, in fact, different animals. If anything, women are taught to suppress both.

Sacred rage is precise. It is the compass needle that swings hard when a boundary has been crossed, when something is ready to die, when we are about to betray ourselves in a way that matters. It reveals what is loved and worth protecting. It is directional, intentional.

Inflammatory anger is what happens to sacred rage with nowhere to go. When the signals fire yet finds no resolution, no expression, no container adequate to metabolize it. In this way, it can becomes a psycho-cellular loop. Histamine surging. The liver overburdened, estrogen dominating, bile thickening, the entire detox architecture narrowing under the weight of what hasn’t been metabolized — emotionally, biochemically, both.

What is inflammation, if not the body’s most ardent effort to boundary against what is not life-giving?

This summer will mark a three year anniversary of the tower moment in the plant medicine space which catalyzed my midlife metabolic crisis. In my quest for sense making, I had given my power away to confidence masquerading as wisdom in an alleged healing space.

There were times that first year where I questioned if I had given myself endometriosis. I judged my anger around the unresolvable situation I found myself in as I could feel its impact on my liver. Underneath the anger: grief. For feelings of betrayal by the healer archetype, for all the ways the feminine is extracted, for the vulnerable parts of me that I didn’t protect, and for the deepening realization my “healing journey” up to that point may have been a thinly veiled attempt to bypass challenging experiences and emotions I wasn’t neither resourced nor skilled enough to metabolize at the time. Capacity is an interesting thing.

The question I keep returning to this spring as we endeavor the heat of our personal and collective transformations is what functional containers help us receive the wisdom of our anger, and then release it?

I've come to wonder whether escapism and inflammation aren’t two sides of the same coin. When our psycho-cellular footing is compromised, it seems we’re more vulnerable to reaching for intensity because we cannot yet access depth — as well as abdicating our power to whoever offers the most convincing illusion of certainty. I am still learning, in my own body, the difference between stimulation and sustainable energy. Between escapism and embodied spirituality. God really is in the dishes, but some days I crave more than chopping wood and carrying water.

While I believe there is good medicine in the psychedelic space, in retrospect I question whether my attraction to plant medicines moreso reflected a disconnection from my own inner vision. Perhaps this is why I keep returning to the liver.

The science and spirit of metabolic renewal

If we mapped Inanna’s descent on a cellular level, I believe she was passing through liver meridians.

The liver governs our life force, our creative will, our clarity of vision, and our gall — that exquisite word — to act in sacred, sovereign alignment. Biomedicine calls the gallbladder an accessory organ- I call it the seat of our capacity to act on what we know is true. In TCM the liver-channel feeds the eyes, connecting our will, our gall, to the directionality of our unique vision.

When the liver is overburdened our vitality narrows. Our vision narrows. The low hum of undifferentiated anger rises. The channel connecting sight to sovereign action becomes congested, and with it, our ability to clearly perceive what is life-giving and act accordingly.

I have found the nature of the anger stored in the liver accumulates precisely where we have abdicated our power — whether by conditioning as women, force, or simple ignorance. Repressed anger and suppressed immunity often travel the same terrain. The structural reality of living in late-stage extractive systems is not separable from the inflammatory load carried in women’s bodies. When we are chronically asked to suppress, to accommodate, to betray our truth — the liver stores what the psyche cannot yet metabolize. In this way, individually, collectively, we’ve arrived at a flash point- the old systems no longer work.

I believe initiations are endogenous psycho-spiritual expanders. Yet a depleted, inflamed substrate struggles metabolize what it cannot hold. Tending the liver is, in this way, a revolutionary act. Is there anything more political than preparing the soil for what is desiring to be born?

Joy as phoenix medicine

Yung Pueblo writes that when the pain is deep, you have to release it many times.

I recently sat with a trusted elder who gently reflected that it was time to release. Not resolve — release. Resolution suggests the story is concluded. Release means the body is done carrying what the psyche might still be chewing on.

I believe our personal expansions will only ever reflect what we have truly laid to rest. No mud, no lotus. No compost, no nutrients, no harvest. And yet — this is where I think a lot of descent-centered medicine stops too soon. Descent is a part of our initiation- but it is meant as an attunement not an oroboros.

I often work with Women who have been labeled as being “stuck in four low’s” (burnout) on a hair mineral test. Conventional mineral balancing wisdom would have them continue a low stimulation, deep nourishment phase while perhaps exploring what functional container may require more support. Yet I’ve found this lexicon for lacking.

It is not enough to descend. It is not enough to rest. It’s not enough to metabolize anger, to release, to compost what has served its season.

Another question living in me this spring, the one that feels like the actual medicine is not what am I releasing but what am I resurrecting for?

I believe the descent journey is a psycho-cellular and spiritual attunment to something more intrinsically, authentically life giving. A Sovereign Creatress does not rise because the burden was set down- she rises because she has something she cannot not create- a work, a love, a vision so aligned with her soul’s particular genius that it functions as its own metabolic force.

Ray Peat named it plainly: a person’s vitality is drawn forward by meaningful work. We grow to meet the demand of an important opportunity. Similarly our mitochondria do not strengthen and regenerate through ease but hormetic demand — the right challenges, at the right intensity, within an adequate container. Descent works the same way, except the joy felt in self-resurection is not some carrot at the end of a healing journey. Joy is metabolic fuel, the thing the phoenix is actually made of.

What we are asked to reclaim as women expands far beyond our voice and truth, its the rightfulness of our joy and pleasure as divine guidance.

Joy is a metabolic strategy. The creatress who has a vision — a genuine, heart-drawn, soul-sourced reason to rise — has a fundamentally different hormonal and metabolic environment than one who is simply enduring. We cannot separate creative fire from metabolic fire- they are the same fire. When we tend one, we tend the other. When we reclaim our creative sovereignty, we are also, literally, healing our liver. When we support our liver, we recover the clarity of sight and gall to follow our deepest calling- which supports our deepest joy- which is the ultimate metabolic hack.

I submit that joy is not a reward at the end of the healing journey. Joy is metabolic fuel, the thing the phoenix is actually made of.