35. the throat chakra of the world

palestine, the voice and the mythic unveiling of our time

A few weeks ago, I saw a video of Arundhati Roy speaking at the Louisiana Literature Festival. In it, she talked about how the role of the writer has been reduced, how witnessing has been overshadowed by performance, how we are being censored, surveilled and forced to be shaped into something obedient and marketable. It was filmed in 2018, but it has never felt more piercing than now.

Roy, who has always rejected being called an activist, said our job as writers is to write about the world we live in, which is not activism, it’s being a writer. She also said something that lodged itself in me: it’s our job to be unpopular. To tell the truth, even when it costs us. Especially when it costs us.

In the days after watching the video, I had a quiet conversation with someone I’ve worked with for years who represents me. I asked them to be honest: why haven’t I been working much these last couple of years? I had my suspicions, of course, but I wanted someone to look me in the eye and tell me to my face. Even though I know this shift in work hasn’t happened in isolation, since the pandemic, I’ve been undergoing a slow but steady transformation—rethinking how I live, where I live, and how I want to make a living. However, things noticeably changed immediately when I began advocating openly for Palestine. It wasn’t the first time I had spoken publicly about Palestinian liberation, but since October 2023, it has come with growing consequences.

“You’ve taken a more activist route,” they said. “We know this is who you are, that it’s something you had to do… but the brands are afraid of that.”

I don’t share this to blame anyone, but this is the culture we live in. Capitalism teaches us to be sellable to be seen, that we can speak, but only carefully, that we can care, but only quietly. “Activist” here becomes code for troublemaker, for being too much, for being inconvenient, while also flattening the word, ignoring those on the frontlines whose entire lives are dedicated to this work. Diluting the weight of their sacrifice and labour.

But it wasn’t always this way. “Activist” used to be a label people loved to throw on me, and it took me years to shed. It began with my advocacy for diversity in fashion over 15 years ago, when I was labelled a ‘body activist,’ among other things. These were labels I never chose. Back then, “activist” was a term the media and agents loved to assign to anyone who advocated for or cared about anything. It signalled greenwashing, offered credibility, and legitimised a brand. Later, after I published Mixed Feelings, my book on social media, the narrative shifted again. Suddenly, I was being packaged as a supposed ‘mental health activist’. However, the truth is that I’ve never identified as one; I’ve just never seen myself that way.

I write because it’s how I make sense amidst the madness. Because we are not islands, we are connected; to the seas, the land, the trees, the flowers, the bees. I believe in that tethering as a form of loving responsibility. That we are not meant to be alone, that we are meant to care about each other. Through my writing and my ongoing one-to-one work as a somatic guide, I explore the space between the personal and the political, the internal and the collective. If I am an activist, it’s only in the way Alice Walker articulated it: “Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” To me, it’s not an identity, but a responsibility.

I know I’m not alone. Writers, artists, doctors, teachers, filmmakers, and students, so many have been punished for refusing to stay silent, for naming what is. For believing the truth still matters and refusing to look away.

Last week, I saw another video of a woman outside the EU Commission in Brussels. It undid me. She was screaming in a way so guttural, so visceral, so raw and animal-like that every hair on my arm stood up. In French, she howled, “forgive me, Gaza,” over and over, until she collapsed onto the concrete, sobbing so hard it shook her whole body. A few people walking past tried to help, but they didn’t know how; they just stood there hovering, stunned by the weight of her grief, unsure whether to reach out or look away.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she cried, again and again, her voice splitting open something inside me, something I had tried to block within myself. Some kind of primal programming in me responded to it, connecting me to others, to our collective grief, to our animal nature, to the part of us we’re taught to hide, to silence, to forget. Her breakdown looked like what so many of us carry just under the surface, as we scroll past the violence, the faces, the voices begging us to save them, begging us to see them, and still we freeze, we hesitate, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to hold the unbearable. She screamed in a way I’ve wanted to scream every day for over 600 days, to release the helplessness and the terror trapped in my body, eating me from the inside. Hearing her, I remembered that in a scream lies power, truth, and purity. It is nothing short of sacred.

How many times have you felt that rush, that fire to speak or scream, and suppressed it? The Quakers got their name from that very trembling, the quake that moved through the body when truth needed to be spoken. They believed that when the spirit stirred the voice, it had to rise; the voice quaking was a sign to speak. There is a cost to swallowing it, a cost to silencing ourselves. A price we’ll carry, maybe forever, for what we didn’t say.

I once read that Palestine sits at the throat chakra of the world. The throat chakra is the centre of communication, of truth, of expression. It’s the chakra that governs our ability to speak, to say what is real, to name what hurts, and to stand in the power of our voice. When the throat chakra is open, truth moves freely. When it’s blocked, we choke, we fall silent and swallow the unspeakable. Whether or not you believe in the metaphysics of energy centres, the metaphor of ‘the throat chakra’ is too fitting to ignore. This is a battle over voice, over who gets to speak and who is silenced, over truth and narrative, censorship and expression, memory and meaning.

Right now, Palestine is where the battle for the soul of the world is being fought. A battle for truth itself. What’s unfolding in Gaza, and across the region, is not just genocide, or a war, it’s an unveiling. The collapse of democracy, the overt collusion of governments and the death of the moral authority we were raised to believe in. It’s a tearing open of the lies we’ve lived under. The gaslighting is beyond political; it’s deeply spiritual. It tells us that what we see, we should not have seen, and what we feel, we shouldn’t feel. That truth becomes subjective the moment it’s inconvenient.

Over these last 20 months, we’ve witnessed a campaign of censorship and silencing so vast it has reshaped the cultural landscape. As one guest said on Democracy Now, even McCarthyism doesn’t quite cover it anymore. People have been smeared, shadowbanned and made examples of, not for inciting violence, but for speaking against it. The throat chakra is under siege, and the violence is not just in bombs or bullets; it is in the gaslighting, the erasure, the constant attempt to sever truth from voice.

And it’s no coincidence that this is happening in the land where the three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — were born. A land of prophets, of revelation, of exile and return. These faiths, which once carried the seeds of moral truth and deep spiritual longing, have also had their own stories taken out of context, weaponised, to dominate, to control, to censor, to silence. They have been used to claim ownership over a region that gave rise to the stories that have shaped the last two thousand years of civilisation. These are some of the most potent myths ever told, exported in some form to nearly every part of the planet. Stories that were meant to guide us back to love, to justice, to each other, have been twisted into tools of conquest, domination and division.

But humans have lived on Earth far longer than two thousand years. These are not our only stories; they are just the loudest ones in recent memory. Beneath them are older myths, older ways of knowing, ways that understood collapse as part of the cycle, that held endings as thresholds, that knew the Earth as sacred. We are not the first to live through the unravelling of a world, and we will not be the last. This moment feels part of a much longer rhythm, one of death and renewal, forgetting and remembering, silence and voice.

Grace Lee Boggs, the Chinese American philosopher, writer and lifelong activist often asked, “what time is it on the clock of the world?”, as a way to call us into deeper historical awareness and moral responsibility, to locate ourselves in the long arc of human struggle and transformation, to understand what this moment is asking of us. For her, revolution was not only about changing systems but about growing our souls. We thought we were freeing Palestine, but perhaps, as the quote goes, “Palestine is freeing us,” revealing the violence of empire in its purest form, showing us where we are in history.

This week, violence has intensified across the region: Israel has launched new strikes on Lebanon, exchanges of fire with Hezbollah have escalated, and Iran has retaliated by attacking a US military base in Qatar. Meanwhile, the U.S., under the familiar guise of pre-emption, has bombed Iran, not in response to any imminent threat, but as part of a long-standing pattern of manufacturing war to sustain its dominance. There is no existential danger, only the strategic interest of empire. In lockstep with Israel, the U.S. is not only actively supporting and defending a genocide but deepening its imperial project. This is the same playbook that justified the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, recycled for a world that no longer buys the script.

We are watching the same tired narrative unfold, one we have seen too many times before. Only now, it feels even more out of step with reality, as if those in power are clinging to a performance many no longer believe. The gaslighting is so pervasive, the atmosphere thick with contradiction, grief and fear. It feels like we are living at a tipping point, one that has been building for years but now feels unmistakably close to rupture. They say empires are always the most violent at their end, and perhaps this is what we are witnessing: the convulsions of a collapsing order before the changing of the guard.

Once the throat chakra opens, it cannot be quietly closed. Once truth moves through the body, it refuses to be re-swallowed. This is what it means to be activated. Not simply to be outraged, but to be rearranged. To feel the voice rise not just in the throat, but in the chest, the belly, the bones. What is happening in Palestine and across the region has touched the deepest parts of us, revealing how all of our struggles are connected. Iran, Congo, Sudan, the ICE raids, climate crisis, systemic terror, displacement, carceral ‘justice’, extraction, grief. All are a part of the same wound. And though we may tremble, and though the path ahead is uncertain, our voices have returned, and with it the knowing that to speak is holy. To feel is holy. To stand in truth, even as the world burns, is the most sacred thing we have left.

We are living through the end of a world and the beginning of something we do not yet have language for. A collapse of the moral scaffolding we thought would hold us. And perhaps this is what the ancient stories were preparing us for, not apocalypse as annihilation, but as unveiling. Not just the death of old systems, but the return of the soul. In the disorientation, the grief, the rupture, something sacred is being remembered. That the world is not made of power, but of spirit, that truth is not just a fact, but a frequency. And that each of us carries a thread.

A couple of weeks ago, my mother held a mirror up to me in the way only a mother can. I was telling her how I was struggling to bring something up in my relationship, and she said quietly, “It’s amazing how much easier you find it to speak up for others than for yourself.” I looked at her in shock at how clearly she had just synthesised something so big for me. How I’ve always found it easier to raise my voice for the world than for myself. And for a long time, I thought those things were separate, but now I see they are woven together. The more I speak for life, for the planet, for Palestine, the more I feel my own voice strengthening, the more I learn to speak for myself too.

Maybe speaking for others is where some of us begin. A kind of practice ground for the voice we’ve buried. And maybe that’s not a detour, but the path itself. This past year has stripped away so much — income, platforms, belonging — but it has also stripped away the shape I once shrank myself to fit into, the one that whispered instead of roared. Because what is this moment if not a call to remember the sound of our own voices?

We are not just here to bear witness. We are here to break the silence that broke us. And maybe, in speaking up for what is true, we begin to return to ourselves. Maybe this is how we heal the wound in the throat. One word at a time, one truth at a time, until the voice becomes a current too strong to be swallowed.

I like to believe there are always two stories currently unfolding: the story of the world and the story of the soul. They are not separate. What happens in the collective moves through us, too, and what stirs in us also shapes the collective. This is why I can never write about anything else. Our stories are intertwined, and they always have been. This thought brings me comfort, especially now, when everything feels like it’s coming undone and my inner upheaval feels isolated, I try to remind myself this, it is mine but also part of something larger, part of the grief, the reckoning, the awakening that so many of us are moving through together. We are not losing our minds; we are feeling the world because we are not separate from it.

To be alive right now is to feel the voice within us awaken. The throat clearing, the truth rising, even when we do not know where it will land. But the voice is not only here to call out what is unjust; it is also here to cast new spells into the collective field. To speak toward what comes next. The throat chakra not only governs our capacity to speak truth, but also to give shape to what does not yet exist. The chants for Palestinian liberation — Free, free Palestine; from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free — are not only a cry against oppression, but a declaration and a determination, as Palestine has become the battleground where colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, antisemitism, militarism and environmental destruction all meet. It is not just political, it is mythic, a spell cast from the world’s throat summoning another way.

Creation stories exist for a reason. They remind us that the world has ended many times and begun again. That collapse and birth are not opposites, but kin. That we are nature, and nature moves in cycles. The forest falls, and from its decomposition, something new begins. The question is, what will we do differently now?

The old stories of fire and brimstone taught us to fear the end. Capitalism taught us to believe there was nothing beyond. Somewhere along the way, we forgot how to imagine another way. As cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism, quoting philosophers Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” He used this to describe the psychic limits imposed by capitalism, a shrinking of possibility so total that even our imagination has been taken from us. That is how much has been stolen. But imagination is not lost. It lives quietly in the body, in the trembling before words, in the hush before a thought fully forms. It lives in the stories we carry, and in the ones we haven’t yet learned how to tell.

The seeds of another way lives in our longings, in our dreams, in the flickers of feeling that rise when we let ourselves wonder what it might be like to feel free, to feel safe, to belong, to live inside a world built for life. If we let those feelings guide us, even in small ways, perhaps we begin to remember, to use our voices as portals into action, to listen for what is trying to be born through us, even in the dark. To hospice the end of modernity and midwife what is yet to be born.

Because even here, at the edge of what was, the soul remembers: the end is never just the end, it is how we begin again.