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These days, I mark the start and end of my day the same way, by taking a front seat at the window of my temporary apartment by the sea to watch the many swallows have their playtime. Every sunrise and sunset, the horizon becomes a dance floor of more of them than I can count, their joyous cacophony in front of the backdrop of the changing colours of the sky. They take turns chasing each other, sweeping high and low; their little bodies beam with a lightness, moving and flying like they don’t have a care in the world that could possibly weigh them down. Pure euphoric sweetness. At moments, I have envied these little swallows while gazing up at them. Even though I know that honouring the everyday grief that surrounds us impacts our very capacity for joy and vice versa. That feeling of pure joy has been so hard for me to access this year.
The powerful combination of the recent summer solstice and the full moon in Capricorn has brought to light my own behaviours and patterns that have kept me small, revealing how I have internalised dominant, binary, and supremacist thinking due to living and being conditioned under these insidious interconnecting structures. Leading me to adopt the very same harmful myths and illusions of separation, weaponizing them towards others, including the people I truly love who love me. The stars are telling me it’s time to grow up and end this cycle of these ways of being so that I can commit to a new way and vision.
Audre Lorde taught us that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house”, but she also expanded on this by reminding us that “they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”. I myself have been using my shadow tool of choice: judgement. Mainly towards how other people are ‘showing or not showing up’ now. Even though, as people of conscience who are concerned for a better and more just future here for all of us - we must be asking ourselves - how did we get here - and what needs to happen in order to disrupt the culture that enables this dehumanisation and supremacy to continue - is extremely pivotal and important, I can see how my own judgement towards others has often tended to be a projection of the judgement that in reality I have towards myself, for not feeling like I am doing ‘enough’. At its root, that is just trying to mask the sheer helplessness and powerlessness I have been drowning in. By absorbing so much terror alone on this tiny screen of my phone, without having proper rituals around holding the sheer grief and pain of all these apocalypses colliding at once with others, my body and mind have started to shut down. I’ve been sick more than I ever have in my entire adulthood, and my mental health has been on edge, to say the least - and I know I’m not alone here.
I want to be clear; I am not shaming myself or my body for not wanting to participate in any form of business as usual right now when everything in the world is telling us to stop. (Our survival as a world and species tells us we must stop everything we are doing!!!!) I know that I’ve been this down merely signals that I am still alive and have a soul! But I don’t want to shut down completely for good. I want to honour these moments of collapse, but I also want to be able to get back up again. These years ahead will only bring more disruption, and I want to participate in imperfectly dreaming of an alternative whether it comes to some fruition or not. To do nothing and quit now is just too unbearable of an option.
Despite ‘just tryna stay soft in a hard world’ being my mantra for so many years now, as an already highly sensitive person acutely aware of the presence of loss in every moment of life, these months of such utterly disgusting horror and unspeakable abhorrent levels of violence have tipped me over the edge, undeniably hardening my shell. Some days, my body has felt like an anvil, stopping me from showing up in ways I want to. I have been struggling to hold my own complexities as I navigate the many paradoxes of being alive at this time; so many things that used to bring me happiness instead have been bringing me so much guilt and shame. Despite yearning to find another way to live for so long, I try to fight the disillusionment by how the webs of extractivist violent systems of capitalism feel almost impossible to untether from completely. I know I need to find another way to live than to beat myself with this unhelpful rigid stick that is unable to hold my very own complexity. I am trying to continue my own journey of healing, to have the courage to face my own pain so I can move away from constantly being caught in ego, disconnection and reactivity. Allow me to exist in this grey space of not knowing and cultivate more self-compassion for the complex paradoxes.
In a bid to come back into my body, to transmute and alchemise the anvil, I have committed to spending the next few months learning about somatic embodied leadership. In the training I’m in, they view somatics as a way to grow and lead better by connecting mind, body, and spirit through mindful movement and self-awareness and by aligning actions with our core values, often asking us to reflect on how collective transformation serves our personal transformation and vice versa. In class this week, we’ve started to explore what is called ‘conditioned tendencies’. In somatics, conditioned tendencies are our automatic responses and patterns that happen under pressure that impact our thinking/feelings/mood, actions or non-actions, beliefs, muscular contractions, and ways of relating. These are most often learned in our early life as survival mechanisms. They become embodied because we don’t even think of them as they happen instantly. This reactivity is our adaptation to all human safety, belonging, and dignity needs. Often, many of us are making choices to trade one for two or two for one, for example, opting for safety and sacrificing our belonging and dignity. By working with our conditioned tendencies, we want to offer ourselves more space and choices to respond differently.
Our conditioned tendencies often show up in the following ways:
Moving towards others: moving towards the pressure, getting close to it for safety or appeasement. It can make one seem overly nice as one tries to stay near the pressure source.
Moving away from others: involves pulling back and fading into the background for safety and avoiding conflict. One might want connection but pull away, avoid eye contact, not talk to others, not engage at all, or feel the need to disappear.
Moving against others: When faced with pressure, this tendency manifests as fighting for safety or dignity. It manifests as defensiveness, responding to challenges, and putting up walls. When someone approaches, one feels the pressure and responds by reinforcing their defences.
By becoming more aware and working with our embodied responses, we can expand and hold more to move towards the things we want and yearn for. I can recognise that I’ve mostly been responding and reacting by turning away from others (both in person and online) and shutting down when I ultimately wanted a sense of deep connection.
Have you ever wondered why we don’t actually have to do anything to fall into the depths of despair, but to stay positive and have faith takes a form of action? How often does our failure to take action also connect to this impossible need for something to be done perfectly? How much does this stop us from even trying? The now 95-year-old lifelong iconic activist, Buddhist and deep ecologist Joanna Macy says, “Of all the dangers we face from climate chaos to nuclear warfare, none is so great as the deadening of our response”. Her antidote to shutting down is The Work That Reconnects. The Work That Reconnects is a transformative journey through four stages:
Coming from Gratitude
Honouring our Pain for the World
Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes
Going Forth
This open spiral process begins with reflecting on gratitude, grounding us emotionally and mentally. It then moves to honour our collective pain, fostering deep compassion and connecting us to a larger inter-existence. Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes reveals our interconnectedness with all life, highlighting the link between social and environmental justice. Finally, Going Forth encourages actionable steps based on individual capacities and situations, emphasising learning and growth from each attempt. Repeatedly engaging with this spiral strengthens resilience, insight, and commitment to life-affirming actions.
In the book that teaches us how to put WTR into practice: ‘Active Hope: How To Face The Mess We’re In With Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power’ co-authors Joanna Macey and therapist Chris Johnstone explain that to them, hope is not passive nor hopeful. It is not a blind hope. They acknowledge that if we wait until we feel hopeful, we will never do anything. Their idea of hope is connected to what we love and what we desire, and we use these things as our motivators for doing it anyway, despite the outcome. Our world is experiencing so many colliding catastrophes that it’s so easy to overcome the overwhelming feeling of it all. I find Molly Brown's (another close collaborator and teacher of the WTR) mantra helpful, "I can’t do everything, but I can do my part," to underscore the importance of identifying our roles. To be able to ask ourselves, "What’s mine to do? What’s yours to do? What’s ours to do?".
After having this book for so long and meaning to read, my deep despair this week finally caused me to reach for it. It was as if the book was whispering to me, “It’s time to read me”. I’m a few chapters in, and I can really say it feels like the medicine I need right now. I started thinking about how it might also be the much-needed medicine for many of us who feel similarly. I wondered what it could be like to do this work together. I want to make an offer and an invitation here to start thinking/dreaming about how to co-create a (un)learning space of grief, love and action. A place beyond the confines of the polarising trauma/shame/isolation/ spirals of our current social media model.
The cultivation of a new way and world cannot be perfect. We are in unknown territory. So many things could still happen for the pendulum to swing towards creating a more loving and just world, but it requires us to partake and do something. Let’s learn how to hold each other in our suffering, joy and empathy instead of turning on each other in ways that don’t actually support our collective liberation. Let's alchemise this despair and channel loss into gratitude to be able to expand our capacity to contribute to the world we believe in together. TRUE healing and liberation require us to unlearn and remember who we are at our essence. We need to honour our own transmutation process so we can still be the energy of love in the storm and the microcosm of the macro because the birth of an alternative world has to happen through us.
We need imagination to create new worlds, and to do so, we must be able to feel into something that lies beyond dehumanisation, destruction and decimation. If words weave worlds, let us use them bi-focally, in a way that names the violence of the present but also uses them to dream other expansive possible realities. As I get into bed, I think of Palestine. I focus on the nourishing soil, running my hands through it while I watch in delight as thousands of baby olive saplings grow into big trees. I see children's faces laughing, playing, and hugging. I see Palestinians at the beach. I see big family feasts, I see dancing - I see love. I think of our non-human friends, the blue sunbirds, swallowtail butterflies and the Arabian gazelle, who are also fighting against their own extinction right now, multiplying in their thousands. I drop into my heart and expand it to all those oppressed in the struggle right now the world over, from Sudan to the Congo, from the River, the Sea and beyond; you are not alone. I pray for nothing short of an absolute miracle to alter the course of our history where this intolerable cruelty brings in a new paradigm centred in love, care and justice.
I read somewhere recently that the magic of birdsong is that it calms our nervous system because for the birds to sing this way, it means there are no predators around. I suddenly realised that instead of showing me what I can’t access, they are here to show me what I can. They are my reminder to soften when life tries to harden me. I am drawn to this work of softening, to embrace my own complexity and perfect imperfection, not because I am already an expert but because it’s what I am here to learn and share in this lifetime. As I sat at the window again this morning to watch them do their ritual, I let my chest open up to feel it all: the love, the awe, the grief, the joy, the gratitude and the alive-ness of this exact moment. That everything I yearn for is already here, in me.
May we all feel safe.
May we all feel belonging.
May we all feel dignity.
Liberation for all.
Much love,
Naomi
PS - Here is a sign-up sheet for the Imperfect Active Hope group. I’m just trying to gauge interest and will take it from there. If reading isn’t your thing, they also have a free interactive video-led program that takes us on a 5-week learning journey led by co-author and Joanna’s 30-year-long collaborator resilience therapist Chris Johnstone. I think I will probably cap at 15 people so we can keep it intimate while we figure out the co-creation process, but yes, let’s see how we go!
Also, before you go:
This week, I’m uplifting three campaigns.
One Million Sustainable Pads Campaign - the current devastating conflict in Sudan has disrupted millions of lives, creating a distressing reality for women and girls—menstruation. Each reusable pad symbolizes support and a chance for these women and girls to reclaim their lives and dignity.
Baitumaal - provide life-saving, life-sustaining and life-enriching humanitarian aid in the form of food packages, healthcare and clean water to people in Gaza right now.
Congo Goma Actif - are directly supporting refugees affected by the war in North Kivu with food and shelter.