ON BEING HERE
On Being Here is where I gather some of these observations. In writing, in photographs, and in the questions I keep finding myself inside. There is no particular order to any of it. Begin wherever something catches.
Margaret Macchiarini Crosson, Somatic Psychotherapist & Founder
THE PRACTITIONER
A gentle path back into the body
I began my journey at the intersection of somatic psychotherapy, yoga, and ritual facilitation. My work is built on a simple, foundational trust: that your body carries vital, precise information about what you protect, desire, and need to heal.
Through deep attunement and somatic discernment, I help individuals and groups translate physical intuition into raw internal footing. We do not do this to attain a static state of calm, but to grow our capacity to witness, choose, and live with absolute integrity.
"We begin with the body—not because calm is the goal, but because the body is the compass."
Margaret M. Crosson, MSW, LSWAIC, RYT-200
I write because I keep noticing things.
The ways we become ourselves. The things our bodies know before we do. What happens between people, and what happens inside us because of the worlds we belong to. Questions of spirit, attachment, making, suffering, beauty, difference, and being alive.
Writing gives me somewhere to stay with what I notice. To turn it over, follow it further, and see what else might be living inside it. I don't always arrive somewhere. Sometimes the question becoming more interesting is enough.
A few questions I keep finding myself inside.
01
What if the body has been participating all along?
Postures of Being follows the body as more than a place where experience happens. It considers posture, sensation, protection, attachment, attention, and the ways a life becomes physically organized around what it has learned.
For anyone curious about the distance—and conversation—between what we know and how we actually live.
02
There are many ways to leave ourselves. What brings us back?
Instructions for Returning is concerned with return: to the body, to discernment, to presence, to the ordinary material world beneath all of our interpretation.
These essays consider what becomes possible when we stop asking ourselves to transcend being human and become more interested in inhabiting it.
03
What does it take to belong without becoming the same?
Sovereign Belonging begins with the possibility that difference is not an obstacle to intimacy but one of its conditions.
These essays move through relationship, self-possession, diversity, communication, conflict, love, and the ongoing practice of remaining a distinct person while allowing ourselves to be changed by contact with others.
04
And what if the problem isn't always located inside the person?
Mental Health Under Empire examines the stories we have inherited about suffering—and what those stories ask us to believe about ourselves.
Through essays on diagnosis, adaptation, coercion, institutions, self-trust, and the authority we give away, this collection asks what changes when we become curious about the worlds people have survived alongside the symptoms they developed within them.
05
Making may have more in common with growing than we think.
Creation as Ecology looks at creativity as a material process: soil, decomposition, roots, seasons, constraint, relationship, emergence.
Rather than asking how to become more productive or certain, these essays observe what the living world already knows about bringing something into existence—and what humans might remember by paying attention.
I photograph because I keep looking.
The things we make. The things that grow without us. The ways bodies arrange themselves around one another. Evidence of ritual, attention, beauty, decay, scale, and time.
Photography gives me somewhere to put what I notice before I know what I think about it. Sometimes the looking is enough.
A few things that have caught me lately.
