Monday, February 23, 2015
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Contact Dance: A Metaphor for Human Connection
I went to an Improvisational Contact Dance gathering for the first time today. What a beautiful community! I've been shown something so special through this practice and its group of warm, open humans who are eager to help one another grow more into their lives (as the members of many conscious communities are humbly apt to do). Contact dance is a metaphor for the life experience as we relate to one another and move through the world.
We face the stories that our minds create constantly -- sometimes we turn towards them; other times, we're more able to turn away from them in the name of presence. Many of these stories come up for us and interfere on ours paths to fluidity; for me, I struggle with dropping into the somantic experience in favor of giving in to my stories. Contact dance is something that "feels hard" to me, and this is for the reason that, throughout most of my life, I've categorized experiences as somewhere on a spectrum that includes that quantifier: Things are easy, things are hard; things are stories, man. "I'm not good at this" comes up a lot. The thought-pattern that says to me, "I'm not good at this, I'm not good at this", stops me from being fully in anything at all because I'm not recognizing that we are good, always. At everything. Good is a natural state of being; it's what and how we are. Our minds work hard to clutter up this simple truth -- and pile all sorts of un-truths on top it -- so that we act in certain ways that are in alignment with our believed state of being: We believe good to be subjective. We believe more and feel less. But we're still good, even when "I'm not good at this" is the soundtrack of our mind's experience.
Contact dance forces you -- the gentleness or harshness of this force being parallel to how you force things in your own life, of course -- to release this story. The flow of the dance shifts along with this process.
We find fluidity when we relate to each others' heaviness -- and it is through relating to heaviness that we find lightness: sweet release.
Because of ground and breath, we find life. Life is expressed through contact -- with ground and with breath, and also with one another. Contact dance is an expression of this manifestation of experience. As humans, we find ourselves most often with our feet on the ground, relating to a vertical axis. Through this relation to earth, we move. But our heaviness does not always want to move with us in this way -- and it is through respecting and relating to ground and the vertical expression, and then finding other forms of movement in order to release this heaviness, that we find deeper connection. That connection comes first when we realize closer contact with ourselves. We grow into greater contact with ourselves as we grow lighter, and through the space that's created by the shifting of heaviness, we find connection with each other. We give our heaviness to the ground when it grows too much for us to carry ... or we give it to one another to be held, moved, transformed. Through this relating, a dance evolves -- and we reach more deeply into the life within ourselves.
We face the stories that our minds create constantly -- sometimes we turn towards them; other times, we're more able to turn away from them in the name of presence. Many of these stories come up for us and interfere on ours paths to fluidity; for me, I struggle with dropping into the somantic experience in favor of giving in to my stories. Contact dance is something that "feels hard" to me, and this is for the reason that, throughout most of my life, I've categorized experiences as somewhere on a spectrum that includes that quantifier: Things are easy, things are hard; things are stories, man. "I'm not good at this" comes up a lot. The thought-pattern that says to me, "I'm not good at this, I'm not good at this", stops me from being fully in anything at all because I'm not recognizing that we are good, always. At everything. Good is a natural state of being; it's what and how we are. Our minds work hard to clutter up this simple truth -- and pile all sorts of un-truths on top it -- so that we act in certain ways that are in alignment with our believed state of being: We believe good to be subjective. We believe more and feel less. But we're still good, even when "I'm not good at this" is the soundtrack of our mind's experience.
Contact dance forces you -- the gentleness or harshness of this force being parallel to how you force things in your own life, of course -- to release this story. The flow of the dance shifts along with this process.
We find fluidity when we relate to each others' heaviness -- and it is through relating to heaviness that we find lightness: sweet release.
Because of ground and breath, we find life. Life is expressed through contact -- with ground and with breath, and also with one another. Contact dance is an expression of this manifestation of experience. As humans, we find ourselves most often with our feet on the ground, relating to a vertical axis. Through this relation to earth, we move. But our heaviness does not always want to move with us in this way -- and it is through respecting and relating to ground and the vertical expression, and then finding other forms of movement in order to release this heaviness, that we find deeper connection. That connection comes first when we realize closer contact with ourselves. We grow into greater contact with ourselves as we grow lighter, and through the space that's created by the shifting of heaviness, we find connection with each other. We give our heaviness to the ground when it grows too much for us to carry ... or we give it to one another to be held, moved, transformed. Through this relating, a dance evolves -- and we reach more deeply into the life within ourselves.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
The Circle of Life
I've had what I'd called the "Writer's Curse" all my life. I try to narrate my own story, constantly. I narrate it to myself as it's happening, or I make up a story when I don't feel the current narrative is one I want to read. (The latter types of stories often fall apart when "reality", or Spirit, shows me a clearer scope into how things really are.) I often journal as if someone might read it one day, as if I'm telling the story to someone other than myself. I've never found much use for journaling just for myself, just for simple processing. I'm inclined towards storytelling. My journaling is a process, no doubt; its value is that it becomes the narrative that I'll stumble through, its outline my map that carries me through to the other side of the story. But even with maps, we lose the route sometimes; get re-routed to some new path. But it all comes full-circle, and looking back at the map I've constructed through my writing, I can make sense of the various turns I chose to take on any particular leg of my journey.
Everything is a circle.
Beyond this, each living being has a story. We humans tend to be a bit egocentric -- being the only species who has -- to our knowledge :) -- learned how to write our stories so they are translatable by others of our species. This creates in many of us a feeling like our stories are perhaps more special, more unique than those of a species whose story we cannot read, cannot hear or see in the ways we are taught that "hearing" or "seeing" means. We skim then sit atop one of a few uppermost layers like they're all that we know, so indeed they are.
We are indeed unique and magical beings -- no more or less unique and magical than grasshoppers, vaulting themselves from place to place with some somewhere-known intention in their spring; no more unique and magical than lions in the African bush hunting and feeding their young and inspiring Elton John renditions of songs that still bring can bring us to tears long after first hearing them in our angst-y adolescent years. We are no more unique and magical than foxes, or bears, or otters, or their ancestors or their young, or the cells that make up any of them -- each of these creatures holds a unique purpose and carries with it a message, a story. Its message and story tells of why and how its life came to be, and fits in perfectly. We are no more unique and magical than any other being ... Our brains just work in a way that creates for us conditions like the "Writer's Curse" -- along with a plethora of other curses: burdens humans must bear. This blog was created to share a piece of my story; I am grateful for this condition, because it's brought me to examine, ever closer, my own narrative. It is unique. Magical, even.
Everything is a circle.
Every once in a while, when I can check out of my own story, I'll look around in sheer awe at the stories swirling around me at any given time. That is to say, this is how I've seen people: Each fills a body that moves through its life within a set of circumstances for the purpose of fulfilling certain and unique karma. How this plays out for each person is the story of their life, and every single human has one, as well as the humans who came before that human, who made way for this one or that one to take their place. Each one has a story. Stories do not die, like most things we cannot touch.
Beyond this, each living being has a story. We humans tend to be a bit egocentric -- being the only species who has -- to our knowledge :) -- learned how to write our stories so they are translatable by others of our species. This creates in many of us a feeling like our stories are perhaps more special, more unique than those of a species whose story we cannot read, cannot hear or see in the ways we are taught that "hearing" or "seeing" means. We skim then sit atop one of a few uppermost layers like they're all that we know, so indeed they are.
We are indeed unique and magical beings -- no more or less unique and magical than grasshoppers, vaulting themselves from place to place with some somewhere-known intention in their spring; no more unique and magical than lions in the African bush hunting and feeding their young and inspiring Elton John renditions of songs that still bring can bring us to tears long after first hearing them in our angst-y adolescent years. We are no more unique and magical than foxes, or bears, or otters, or their ancestors or their young, or the cells that make up any of them -- each of these creatures holds a unique purpose and carries with it a message, a story. Its message and story tells of why and how its life came to be, and fits in perfectly. We are no more unique and magical than any other being ... Our brains just work in a way that creates for us conditions like the "Writer's Curse" -- along with a plethora of other curses: burdens humans must bear. This blog was created to share a piece of my story; I am grateful for this condition, because it's brought me to examine, ever closer, my own narrative. It is unique. Magical, even.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
The Witchiness of Womyn
We womyn are wired in a very different way than society would have us believe. When the convictions of witches led to public burning in a time that burned a deep scar onto Salem's name, a fear in men was to blame. A fear that there might be more to life's fabric than was available to the touch; more stitched into It than what the Bible, and Man's God, were able to decipher. A fear that womyn, that woMEN (creatures that were so rigidly held to a standard of subservience because, after all, we were created of man's rib, just a singular and simple bone located in his digestive cavity) might hold deep knowledge of the why, the sort of why that wisdom whispers to us ... and that that whisper might have a gender preference as to whom it reveals itself.
And it's true: this why weaves its tales of the sacrament that is us: it tells stories of secrets, ones of creation and its cycles, and this was too much for a man to bear. Embarrassing, even. It needed to not be, said men, who were raised by their fathers, and them by their fathers, to believe that they held all knowledge, that they would bring home what would sustain a family: Food apprehended through control and strategy; knowledge of nearby danger, and protection when it drew close.
So to the fire with the witches it was, literally speaking.
If womyn escaped the fury of men's fire, they were left to tend to it, at home, and to raise the children. Perhaps some men and boys, those of our brothers who drew close to their own inner Divine Feminine, saw more deeply into this implication: perhaps they saw that it was because of the fire that children were created. That children were raised from the fire, by the fire, kept warm by this fire while in the womb of womyn and later, around the fire next to womyn.
In many early matriarchal cultures, womyn were seen as connected to the Sun and men to the Moon, rather than the reverse. Womyn were seen as solar goddesses; we were seen as the creators, we were held in exaltation because, like the Sun, it was womyn who gave life to life.
We hold all knowledge, still, deep within our bodies, deep within these sacred temples that echo with the cries of joy when we fill them with dance, with craft, with movement, with creation, with life -- they echo with the cries of a child. There is a reason that that cry, when heard by a mother, can awaken something in her soul that pushes her to an edge not journeyed to until that time. It is the primordial cry of creation, and it screams of cycles -- within those cycles can resonate for a womyn a manifestation of deep joy or deep pain. A mama acts on that burning instinct, and the child is formed from that fire.
The child's cry is within us all: it is echoing, and begging us to return to our own Divine Feminine.
It is not only through the physical creation and birth of a child that a child may be born. Through our deep listening, through the activation of our own healing, we can re-create our inner child. That child has never left us. We hold within us a choice to heal that child, to protect the child that we once were. How we nurture and nourish that child that is each of us is the beginning and the end. It is what creates our lives -- it is true that we are burned by the fire or we are created from it. There is a reason, they say, that before one dies, that person's whole life flashes before their eyes. From the womb we came, and to the womb we will return. This sort of primal and unconscious magic, this cycle in reverse, takes us on a return journey to our first mother, to the mother of all beings, to the Creatix of Alchemy, our Mama Gaia.
And Gaia, our Earth Mother, provides us with tools to implement this practice, this practice of returning to the earth, to healing her and to healing all mothers, including the one within each of us. We have the resources, here and now, to come home to ourselves: Activate your knowing, the knowing that you hold deep magic, and that this magic lives within you. Live from the knowledge of your womb and less from the knowledge of your mind. If you don't know where to start, seek your sisters. Reach out to them. They are all around you. Listen for them in the forest, in school, in shops and stores, when you are out -- and listen to the voice within yourself when you are in. Turn towards that voice; answer it. And when you can't find that voice, because there will be times when the fire is blazing around you and you cannot hear the voice of others, know that this voice is your own, and make it heard ... make it heard for yourself. You are here for a reason, right here and right now, and it is to own this sacred wisdom. You are here, and this is no mistake, for fire is perfect, and unique, and we all know the trick to stoking a fire. It is through your breath that your fire will grow.
We are intuitive beings. All beings are, for held within all of us is the Divine Feminine. And as physical manifestations of the Divine Feminine, we womyn have a special sort of access. When we open to our power, we see into that chasm that we've allowed to form before us. We feel deeper. We see images, visions, dreams that can touch the soft and tender and seemingly invisible core at the center of our existence. We are Goddess, and it is no wonder that fearful cries of "Witch, Witch!," that sacred synonym, held such impact. Witches were once burned -- returned by force to the alchemical fire from which we all came and to which we will return. It can be our choice to return to that fire now, to the fire of our wombs, to our secret and expansive, all-pervading knowledge. Listen, whisper, then let your voice grow louder so that it matches the resounding accusation.
Witch! Wear this emblem and know it is a sacrament with a purpose. Let this truth -- its aliveness, its breath -- to grow the fire within you every day of your precious life until it returns to embers, to the dust of bone, to the remnants of smoke from exhale.
Then, inhale it again.
And it's true: this why weaves its tales of the sacrament that is us: it tells stories of secrets, ones of creation and its cycles, and this was too much for a man to bear. Embarrassing, even. It needed to not be, said men, who were raised by their fathers, and them by their fathers, to believe that they held all knowledge, that they would bring home what would sustain a family: Food apprehended through control and strategy; knowledge of nearby danger, and protection when it drew close.
So to the fire with the witches it was, literally speaking.
If womyn escaped the fury of men's fire, they were left to tend to it, at home, and to raise the children. Perhaps some men and boys, those of our brothers who drew close to their own inner Divine Feminine, saw more deeply into this implication: perhaps they saw that it was because of the fire that children were created. That children were raised from the fire, by the fire, kept warm by this fire while in the womb of womyn and later, around the fire next to womyn.
In many early matriarchal cultures, womyn were seen as connected to the Sun and men to the Moon, rather than the reverse. Womyn were seen as solar goddesses; we were seen as the creators, we were held in exaltation because, like the Sun, it was womyn who gave life to life.
We hold all knowledge, still, deep within our bodies, deep within these sacred temples that echo with the cries of joy when we fill them with dance, with craft, with movement, with creation, with life -- they echo with the cries of a child. There is a reason that that cry, when heard by a mother, can awaken something in her soul that pushes her to an edge not journeyed to until that time. It is the primordial cry of creation, and it screams of cycles -- within those cycles can resonate for a womyn a manifestation of deep joy or deep pain. A mama acts on that burning instinct, and the child is formed from that fire.
The child's cry is within us all: it is echoing, and begging us to return to our own Divine Feminine.
It is not only through the physical creation and birth of a child that a child may be born. Through our deep listening, through the activation of our own healing, we can re-create our inner child. That child has never left us. We hold within us a choice to heal that child, to protect the child that we once were. How we nurture and nourish that child that is each of us is the beginning and the end. It is what creates our lives -- it is true that we are burned by the fire or we are created from it. There is a reason, they say, that before one dies, that person's whole life flashes before their eyes. From the womb we came, and to the womb we will return. This sort of primal and unconscious magic, this cycle in reverse, takes us on a return journey to our first mother, to the mother of all beings, to the Creatix of Alchemy, our Mama Gaia.
And Gaia, our Earth Mother, provides us with tools to implement this practice, this practice of returning to the earth, to healing her and to healing all mothers, including the one within each of us. We have the resources, here and now, to come home to ourselves: Activate your knowing, the knowing that you hold deep magic, and that this magic lives within you. Live from the knowledge of your womb and less from the knowledge of your mind. If you don't know where to start, seek your sisters. Reach out to them. They are all around you. Listen for them in the forest, in school, in shops and stores, when you are out -- and listen to the voice within yourself when you are in. Turn towards that voice; answer it. And when you can't find that voice, because there will be times when the fire is blazing around you and you cannot hear the voice of others, know that this voice is your own, and make it heard ... make it heard for yourself. You are here for a reason, right here and right now, and it is to own this sacred wisdom. You are here, and this is no mistake, for fire is perfect, and unique, and we all know the trick to stoking a fire. It is through your breath that your fire will grow.
We are intuitive beings. All beings are, for held within all of us is the Divine Feminine. And as physical manifestations of the Divine Feminine, we womyn have a special sort of access. When we open to our power, we see into that chasm that we've allowed to form before us. We feel deeper. We see images, visions, dreams that can touch the soft and tender and seemingly invisible core at the center of our existence. We are Goddess, and it is no wonder that fearful cries of "Witch, Witch!," that sacred synonym, held such impact. Witches were once burned -- returned by force to the alchemical fire from which we all came and to which we will return. It can be our choice to return to that fire now, to the fire of our wombs, to our secret and expansive, all-pervading knowledge. Listen, whisper, then let your voice grow louder so that it matches the resounding accusation.
Witch! Wear this emblem and know it is a sacrament with a purpose. Let this truth -- its aliveness, its breath -- to grow the fire within you every day of your precious life until it returns to embers, to the dust of bone, to the remnants of smoke from exhale.
Then, inhale it again.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Giving In To The Night // Trusting
So, I can either begin to say no to the stories that follow me around, jumping, scrambling, heavy as they land on my back and scramble, provoked by the promise of a vulnerable heart space snack, into my chest. I can begin to say no to this disruptive flow -- counter-intuitive to flow's true nature -- the one that finds itself as a rushing undercurrent of thoughts: knowing what's unknown, the knowing and unknowing of illusions. The heaviness spreads to my belly, the thought-flow breaks through the dam where it reunites with its catalyst on the other side, the lizard brain, fight or flight, I've been here all my life.
Or, I can continue to let these cycles carry on -- the ones that disallow any beliefs that bring me to I'm okay, that everyone is okay. Okay in the way I want things to be okay. This bed sheet keeps tearing underneath me, I've had these sheets for probably half my life and that number means something to me now, even though it did then, too. It's a green bed-sheet, this one that tears: Anahata -- feels right. I don't change the sheets but it doesn't feel like it's out of laziness. Right now, it's just more comfortable, and it's here; earth-stuff. Worn. I can see what's white underneath -- when I was growing up my mother always lined the mattress with a fitted cover first, and then fit and laid the sheets on top when she would make our beds, orderly: this habit has found itself reflected in me. Orderly. I like things this way. But for the first time, maybe ever, when I changed my bed last I didn't use a fitted sheet underneath these green ones, so the white I see here is the down feather layer I lie on for added comfort -- and support. It feels okay.
--
(I had a vision that two shells I gave you, melded by residue from the sea, would break apart when we did, and today when I saw those shells, they were as it had been in my mind. "We were together for a little while after," you said. It's true. The sea does as it pleases.)
--
May all beings be warm, be kind, be at peace.
Or, I can continue to let these cycles carry on -- the ones that disallow any beliefs that bring me to I'm okay, that everyone is okay. Okay in the way I want things to be okay. This bed sheet keeps tearing underneath me, I've had these sheets for probably half my life and that number means something to me now, even though it did then, too. It's a green bed-sheet, this one that tears: Anahata -- feels right. I don't change the sheets but it doesn't feel like it's out of laziness. Right now, it's just more comfortable, and it's here; earth-stuff. Worn. I can see what's white underneath -- when I was growing up my mother always lined the mattress with a fitted cover first, and then fit and laid the sheets on top when she would make our beds, orderly: this habit has found itself reflected in me. Orderly. I like things this way. But for the first time, maybe ever, when I changed my bed last I didn't use a fitted sheet underneath these green ones, so the white I see here is the down feather layer I lie on for added comfort -- and support. It feels okay.
--
(I had a vision that two shells I gave you, melded by residue from the sea, would break apart when we did, and today when I saw those shells, they were as it had been in my mind. "We were together for a little while after," you said. It's true. The sea does as it pleases.)
--
May all beings be warm, be kind, be at peace.
Discovering Our Higher Truth by Healing Lower Truth // The Start of the Alchemy of Social Justice, Part Two
This is a manifesto, a call to action, for us -- all of us -- to begin to move into our lower truths, to heal them, and to recognize that in order for us to break cycles now, we must all come together and recognize that yes, while we may never truly understand another's personal pain and suffering, we do all carry within us deep and pervasive and ingrained trauma (again, regardless of which side of oppression it is that we fall). I do not dismiss your pain, and can never fully understand the intricacies and nuances and depth of the channels through which it runs. I see that you have experienced pain, and that you experience pain, and I acknowledge that some of that pain may very well have been from the catalyst of my own doing, or that of my generations of ancestors -- these cycles run deep. I believe this understanding must be packed in with the word "ally": so that when one identifies as "being an ally", one cannot just consider oneself an ally and through this, feel better about oneself and call it a day. What must be packed into the subscription of this label is a sense of responsibility -- to use one's privilege to create an impact. To say this plainly: If you witness a person of a minority being handed the shorter end of the stick, receiving rights lesser than those that they, as a human being, deserve (and less than the rights that are being doled out within that same vicinity to those in majority groups), or being treated in a way that doesn't sit well within you, there is a pact you have signed through your calling yourself an ally to STAND UP to this injustice in service of counteracting it. That standing up can be subtle or overt, but it must be done, or you cannot call yourself an ally. You must also understand that you can't ever fully know another's struggle. Know that pain is pain, but many of our ancestors have caused more pain for others than otherwise (and this is of course disregarding, through not being able to access, the pain being self-inflicted upon one's own soul through inflicting pain on another's).
There is a deep divide between humans and it manifests through the instilled notion that a hierarchy must exist; our planet has suffered because of humans' ignorance and arrogance and need for power and ownership. It is no mistake that a great divide between the people exists here on earth. And it seems to be, at times, our personal attachment to our pain and the continuance of a habitual need to place blame and embody the victimized role that continues to divide us, to keep us from coming together in order to heal ourselves and our planet. This is no mistake, and I imagine those at the head of corporations like Wal-Mart and Goodwill and that biggest monster company of all Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (yes, the one that sprays poison on our food and in the process kills the vital pollinators of life) sitting atop their ivory thrones above people riling in the streets, drinking whiskey out of short glasses and smoking exotic cigars and chuckling, simply REVELING in the fact that the people down on the streets have no power. (If you don't know about the deeply unsettling and problematic values upon which each of these companies have built their fortresses, please simply Google them. Links provided, but please own your process of learning and take it farther; take your learning process so far that you recognize that you actually know nothing, and then surrender to it: and here, may you leap into the fire of the unknown, for it is there that the real alchemy occurs.)
There is a deep divide between humans and it manifests through the instilled notion that a hierarchy must exist; our planet has suffered because of humans' ignorance and arrogance and need for power and ownership. It is no mistake that a great divide between the people exists here on earth. And it seems to be, at times, our personal attachment to our pain and the continuance of a habitual need to place blame and embody the victimized role that continues to divide us, to keep us from coming together in order to heal ourselves and our planet. This is no mistake, and I imagine those at the head of corporations like Wal-Mart and Goodwill and that biggest monster company of all Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (yes, the one that sprays poison on our food and in the process kills the vital pollinators of life) sitting atop their ivory thrones above people riling in the streets, drinking whiskey out of short glasses and smoking exotic cigars and chuckling, simply REVELING in the fact that the people down on the streets have no power. (If you don't know about the deeply unsettling and problematic values upon which each of these companies have built their fortresses, please simply Google them. Links provided, but please own your process of learning and take it farther; take your learning process so far that you recognize that you actually know nothing, and then surrender to it: and here, may you leap into the fire of the unknown, for it is there that the real alchemy occurs.)
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Discovering Our Higher Truth by Healing Lower Truth // The Start of the Alchemy of Social Justice, Part One
I have felt incredibly concerned with the state of the world recently. I know I am not alone in this.
I've written a lot here about discovering "higher truth" -- I believe that we each can connect with our own unique purpose and gifts by moving into our higher truth, but it came to me today: the only way to locate our higher truth is by first locating, exploring, and clearing what can be called our "lower truth". So much sludge and muck and karmic pollution has been packed onto and into each of us over the course of thousands of years. This baggage we carry comes in the form of deep ancestral wounds that we carry around with us in our cells. These wounds have been developed through many sorts of trauma: whether our ancestors inflicted or received pain, whether they lost or bore witness to loss, whether they ran from fear, whether or not they stood up or succumbed to the forces of destruction, or whether it was some combination, or all, of these traumas. Diving into them and being with them there, these lower truths within our bodies that express to us generations of loss and pain and fear, will show us elements of why we are just how we are today. It is through their excavation that we will move into our higher truth.
As above, so below; as within, so without.
In order to create real social change and heal the state of the world, change must occur. And I have some ideas for how to incite real change.
Our country is sick because our systems and corporations are sick, and continue to spread their sickness to us: to our land, to our people. We, citizens of earth for a short but meaningful while, cannot sit idly by anymore while our earth is ravaged and drilled out of the illusion of necessity, while her waters and the life that inhabits them are poisoned by massive amounts of physical waste, a manifestation of our own unaligned ignorance. And the part that will keep us stuck here is our refusal to band together and create true, pervasive, effective change.
This divide between us, between our brothers and sisters, is due to unhealed lower truth. It is through recognizing that across time and space, we have been cruel to one another; we have pillaged and plundered and destroyed one another's homes and families and lives -- and it is time to stop. This is not a manifesto against the white man, and although centuries of generations of white men have wreaked havoc and evil on civilization in all its myriad forms. I will mention here that I am white, so I am walking an edge here -- for it is true, I have many ancestors who were oppressive, white men. I carry deep shame within my cells, as we all do for various reasons: I carry much inner conflict around my shame, experiencing certain privileges because I am white and a lack of privileges because I am a female; these flip sides of privilege and the lack of privilege are at work in myriad ways for certain populations of people. (I will mention here that I have gone through periods of giving into the fullness of reactivity to triggers around white men, specifically, for years -- and at times, it has even shown up as a trigger around men in general. I am in process, and have not at all fully integrated what is brought about by this trigger, specifically when that stuff arises from the comments and actions of hetero-identifying, cis-gendered, "A-type", white men [my archetypal trigger] -- I often, in these instances, fall right back into the swamp of my trauma. But perhaps, little by little, by creating more space, by reacting less, we start to surrender to acknowledging our pain and be with it so that we can then release it, breaking cycles in whatever way it means for each of us. We learn that pain will have far less power if we redirect that power towards our own healing.)
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” ―Viktor Frankl
I've written a lot here about discovering "higher truth" -- I believe that we each can connect with our own unique purpose and gifts by moving into our higher truth, but it came to me today: the only way to locate our higher truth is by first locating, exploring, and clearing what can be called our "lower truth". So much sludge and muck and karmic pollution has been packed onto and into each of us over the course of thousands of years. This baggage we carry comes in the form of deep ancestral wounds that we carry around with us in our cells. These wounds have been developed through many sorts of trauma: whether our ancestors inflicted or received pain, whether they lost or bore witness to loss, whether they ran from fear, whether or not they stood up or succumbed to the forces of destruction, or whether it was some combination, or all, of these traumas. Diving into them and being with them there, these lower truths within our bodies that express to us generations of loss and pain and fear, will show us elements of why we are just how we are today. It is through their excavation that we will move into our higher truth.
As above, so below; as within, so without.
In order to create real social change and heal the state of the world, change must occur. And I have some ideas for how to incite real change.
Our country is sick because our systems and corporations are sick, and continue to spread their sickness to us: to our land, to our people. We, citizens of earth for a short but meaningful while, cannot sit idly by anymore while our earth is ravaged and drilled out of the illusion of necessity, while her waters and the life that inhabits them are poisoned by massive amounts of physical waste, a manifestation of our own unaligned ignorance. And the part that will keep us stuck here is our refusal to band together and create true, pervasive, effective change.
This divide between us, between our brothers and sisters, is due to unhealed lower truth. It is through recognizing that across time and space, we have been cruel to one another; we have pillaged and plundered and destroyed one another's homes and families and lives -- and it is time to stop. This is not a manifesto against the white man, and although centuries of generations of white men have wreaked havoc and evil on civilization in all its myriad forms. I will mention here that I am white, so I am walking an edge here -- for it is true, I have many ancestors who were oppressive, white men. I carry deep shame within my cells, as we all do for various reasons: I carry much inner conflict around my shame, experiencing certain privileges because I am white and a lack of privileges because I am a female; these flip sides of privilege and the lack of privilege are at work in myriad ways for certain populations of people. (I will mention here that I have gone through periods of giving into the fullness of reactivity to triggers around white men, specifically, for years -- and at times, it has even shown up as a trigger around men in general. I am in process, and have not at all fully integrated what is brought about by this trigger, specifically when that stuff arises from the comments and actions of hetero-identifying, cis-gendered, "A-type", white men [my archetypal trigger] -- I often, in these instances, fall right back into the swamp of my trauma. But perhaps, little by little, by creating more space, by reacting less, we start to surrender to acknowledging our pain and be with it so that we can then release it, breaking cycles in whatever way it means for each of us. We learn that pain will have far less power if we redirect that power towards our own healing.)
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” ―Viktor Frankl
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