More Mandalas & Self-Acceptance Training

In which I take a deeper look into the self-acceptance work my mother did and also appreciate the beauty of a Korean spa and friendship.

With gratitude for small moments of joy, such as chitchatting with friends on long walks, thrift stores, walking up hills, shooting around, going on the steam train with excited and fearful boys, Sunday dinners, and celebrating the impending arrival of a new being.

If all you want is the Josie update, skip to the bottom.

“We are irrevocably changed when we lose someone we love, because so much of who we are is a reflection of the people who love us.”

—Grief Is Love: Living with Loss by Marisa Renee Lee

March 29, 2025

Dear Mama,

I have been thinking about memory and possessions. I moved to the apartment above mine! I cleaned out my closets and papers and tried to determine which of your handwritten stories and children's books should be kept and what I can let go of. And then I read your writings and I wondered which of our own memories stored deep in our brains are necessary to release. And maybe the Alzheimer's process is secretly a gift. A Marie Kondo for the brain and body.

I feel like some version of a king who is trying to hold onto all the gold, but the gold is just everything your hands have touched. And what will I do with all this gold?

Instead of holding on, I am working on letting go.

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

(Mary Oliver, in Blackwater woods)

I've been working on rebuilding my trust with myself. I had forgotten that I could lose you, and still have you like a coach whispering signature Josie-isms in my ear. Stay grounded. Feel your feet. Do you want to pick an animal card? It's ok to cry. Do you need to take a walk. How about a bath? Do you want to watch a movie? Let's go to the beach and do some toning. I had forgotten that I could talk to you in my head and love you from afar... without needing to hold on to everything you have touched.

In looking through your words from 1990, I see how you worked hard to find a way through your grief and that at times you had to compartmentalize — to put all your feelings in a box and hide it in the closet, and at times you needed to take it out and examine it, before letting it go.

Last fall I went to the spa with a friend — the Korean spa in Washinton that you, Amanda, Gayti and I spent seven hours in on Christmas eve in 2011. I started writing about an attempt to regain a sense of trust in myself.

Korean Spa, Sept 21, 2024

Everyone is wearing matching outfits — like we’re rooting for the same team, but ours is a naked mascot. We wear green and white striped robes and pink towel-berets that make everyone seem stylish in a matching oompa-lumpa kind of way. 

I don’t remember staying for seven hours on Christmas eve in 2011. I only remember that as we sat in the hot tub at one point my mom said:

“Isn’t it great when your boobs float?!” 

And from this perfectly astute observation, I wrote a poem, beginning with this line. And now I want to respond, instead of with laughter, but with a serious honesty that yes, yes Mama, it is so truly great when your boobs float. When you create the time to nap with strangers, when you lose track of self-consciousness because everyone else is naked and no one cares. When you tune into the body and listen to hear how body the body is being (borrowing from Ada Limón in which she says "The body is so body" in The Hurting Kind: Poems). When you concentrate on your own breath enough to notice how it feels in the cold water and then how it changes in warm water. How long you prefer in the jade room versus the salt room. These are all of your embodied preferences, or rather, mine.

And from the sense of being at peace in my own body, with all of its imperfect tan lines, stretch marks and freckles, I am reminded to ask myself what it means to be a being in a body.

How did I manage to lose the trust I had in myself, and how might I recover it?How it felt being someone’s second choice, and how it feels to be wanted and desired first, as a friend or lover. Prioritized within a culture of busyness, it is only a matter of attention that a clear display of care is just a form of paying attention and that attentiveness to yourself, and the way it's displayed to others is the greatest form of generosity. (A nod to Simone Weil here, that "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.")

It is a re-tuning to ensure you are in line with the body and spirit. Maybe this is the religion I never knew I needed. 

Maybe this is my self-acceptance training.

When did you start doing your self-acceptance training with Cherie? Oh, yes I see from your writings it was in 1988.

Love you,

xo Laki

In 1988 my mother began doing work with Cherie McCoy a form of therapy called "Self-Acceptance Training." I pulled the book (Becoming Alive and Real: Journey into the body's truth) from my mom's bookshelf in search of a definition: "Self Acceptance Training, first and foremost, teaches us to be kind to ourselves, leaving the rat wheel of the mind, and coming into the pleasure of who we are as a body, and even deeper, into our connection to the universe of energy."

Even in the book McCoy admits it is a little "woo-woo," but my mother always liked some hippy woo-woo stuff.

And in processing grief, and learning to trust yourself more deeply, maybe we all need more naked spa's and more woo-woo.

This post is part of a series of essays called Josie's House. This is part of a larger work-in-progress-project I envision as a book. Previous essays can be found below.

1. New Beginning: In which I try to figure out how to tell people that the doctor at my mother's assisted living facility referred her to hospice care — meaning that based on her weight loss and decline, she is expected to be gone within six months.
2. Mom Rocks: In which I attempt to introduce my mother and this project.
3. 'Are You My Sister?': In which my Josie-mama thinks I am her sister and I find a letter my mother wrote to her sister after she died in my mother's arms.
4. Mandala's Tiles and Poetry: In which I go looking for tiles in India and re-discover my mother's love of mandalas and some poetry-letters she wrote after my grandmother died. 
5. A Purple-Infused 80th Birthday: In which I marvel at the passage of time, birthdays, and garden metaphors.
6. The Cottage and The Blue Couch: In which I share a draft of an essay about friendship, love, a cottage, and a blue couch.
7. Wearing Pantsuits to Church: Values Search: In which I look at my mother's values alongside my own.
8. A Dream Realized: Journey to India, 1979: In which I share a draft of an essay about my mother's first trip to India, and the next trip when she met my father. 
9. 'Cry Tests' & Journey to Peninsula School: In which I examine a piece of writing on how Josie got her dream job at Peninsula, thanks to the supportive community around her. 
10. Submerge!: In which, I veer off from the aim of this newsletter and share an essay I wrote about my father's death.