Havi Bell Brooks portrait

Havi BrooksHavi Bell Brooks portrait

Pronunciation guide: HA-vee.

Or try saying Harvey with a British accent.

About me

I mostly live on the road, I don’t speak, my favorite thing is dancing.

Tied in second place for favorite things: bridges, bells, secret ops, laughing, napping, peanut butter.

I am currently on Shmita, which is a bit like a sabbatical, and an ever-expanding road trip.

Over the years I’ve written sixteen hundred posts here: I might be nonverbal but I have a lot to say!

About what we do here

Self-fluency: getting to know who and how we are in the world, and in our internal world. What we need, how we best function. We learn to recognize when we’re in our stuff and how we want to interact with it. We remember the magical rule of Oh Right, Shit Is Not About Me.

We play. People turn “mindfulness” and “presence” into this heavy, fraught thing, but actually there are ways to make it fun and playful.

We bring light to shadowy places. We dissolve stuck, rewrite patterns, change how we relate to everything. For example….

Our relationship with ourselves (and our selves), our internal worlds and kingdoms, fuzzy monsters who may or may not like cookies. Also time, space, piles and mysterious projects.

The problem with creative self-investigation is it comes with the worst labels. Blah-self-help-personal-development-time-management-productivity-blah. I will reluctantly admit that we do stuff that kind of falls into some of those categories, but not preachy or motivational. We do it in subversive (and sparkly) ways.

We are all equals here. No external sources of authority needed. I don’t have your answers. I have my answers, and I share how I get to them, but we are all in this together, playing, figuring things out for ourselves. I play with different techniques and rituals, and you are always invited to join in.

What else can I tell you?

This place has been my online home since 2005, and my closest real life friends are people I first met here.

For five beautiful years I ran a center in Portland, Oregon called The Playground, for practicing everything we talk about here. Now I’m done with teaching/coaching and alls form of [front of the room], the only kind of teaching I do now is teaching by not-teaching. More about that later.

I quit email in January of 2009, but I often come hang out in in the comments.

I’m really glad you’re here, glowing love from my thank-you heart,
havi

photo by heaven mcarthur

An entire page about me

The Fluent Self