Tag: Changemakers

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Change Makers

kimberleen

I’m on a writing roll and just finished the previous blog post about me as a ‘Changemaker’. That ended with me questioning how deliberate am I being. Once again as I write this very deliberately in messy, unorganised and detached ways. Doing my best output me at the centre of my world and very clearly dishonouring others and my promises in the process. Fuck!!! The emotional labour is real. The ideologies of success can feel toxic. 

Recently I have been called to look at The Four Agreements again and as great as they are right now I am being shit at them. Which doesn’t bode well for my Trauma-Informed business or even supposed attitude or approach? My Emotional Labour right now feels highly intensive as the demand for my skills seems to be ever-increasing. I wonder how well I am actually skilling up. How well I am holding myself in this accelerated process of deepening. As I sit here anxiously typing away trying to fast forward in order to buy myself time. I feel like I keep on sliding off the treadmill, wobbling off the board as I begin to understand the much deeper responsibility of occupying the space of Change Maker. Where I think at this point I might even want to say honour keeper (OMG it sounds so lame, geeky and real). How about I just managed that? How about I just did what I said I was going to do? What I feel I can achieve? Who I feel I can be responsible too? The things I say I think I can get too. There is soooo much juggling and dropping. I can’t even reference, edit and maintain my website blog well. Let’s be clear here the blog is as much about honouring my own emotional process as it is about projecting my ideas out into the world. Even this I am struggling with and I can’t keep up with my own brain. My own process, my own space of personal self-expression, which has nothing to do with generating change and everything to do with generating personal stability. These are very different things or are they? 

You see stability is the change that I seek to make for myself and indeed other. Even in this toxic fast-paced environment that is hurtling towards disaster. I want the stillness, the openness, the expansiveness of self-knowledge and assurity and yet here I am barely tending to my own innermost needs. Being mildly driven by the passing need to make money. Yes the system still occupies me from time to time. Right now in this moment each article. Blog posts and even presence seem to sprout branches; one more thing to write about. One more nuance to understand, One more deepening understanding of language. Maybe it has all been said before. So who am I typing against the clock for. Maybe radical self-expression is as much as we can do to acknowledge the ever-changing within us. As we process the inevitable change that is happening around us. What is our sole purpose here on Earth to witness the inevitable change as it occurs here on as part of the multiple layered and deeply interconnected process of being alive on planet Earth as part of a far greater and expansive cosmic system?

You see people watching? Regardless of how long we sit still everything changes anyway. In the meantime I must brush my hair and get ready for dinner and think about what respectability is with regards to honouring one’s self.

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Systemic Collapse, it’s here.

kimberleen

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The view from the bedroom window as we begin the process of social distancing.

I heard the news this week that a good friend of mine had finally secured some land for growing willows where they could live out the end of there days as a basket weaver. It’s a delightful story  I’m sure you’ll agree. I congratulated them on their commitment to the revolution, that includes many key elements like slow the fuck down, stay local, grow your own food and do you know your neighbours? Forcing us to aks the much bigger question like do you like where you are?

It’s been a question many of us have been asking as we chose to travel the world looking for better places to be all without taking on the full consequences of our actions. That includes me. Honestly, I was well into my twenties before I realise the impact or air travel on our environment or even seriously started to consider where my food came from. Back then it was all about food miles and now it’s all about community resilience.  Here we are at the end of capitalism and many of us are still living in a bubble where we have very deliberately chosen not to engage with collective responsibility. As we jet set from one global conference to another, barely conscious of the communities we live in and how they might function in a period of systemic collapse.

Systems collapse is here and for me it’s exciting. It’s the real stuff of life. The imagined structures of the world are exactly that, imagined. There are no effective borders for air born illness. We live in a planetary system. We know we can’t eat money. It certainly can’t cure Covid 19 and yet we worship this imaginary substance, that is nothing more than a digital commodity, that has no other purpose than control what people can or can’t do. Imagine if everything was free. Imagine if living was free. What would we be doing then? Most of us would be resting. Most of us would be in deep recovery after centuries of abuse. If our worth wasn’t caught up in money or the idea of productivity. A very different world is now emerging where community resilience is key. More than that where human connection is at the forefront of how we interact. How are many of us going to live if we actually have to stop? What is going to come up for us? That we are isolated? That we are alone? That it’s uncomfortable? That we need to make changes to our lives that doesn’t involve chasing down a mystical cash cow. What if you just did what you love? What if just if you believed that rest was resistance and it’s powerful? What if we just change how we thought about everything even ourselves. what if we didn’t have to call it fancy things like systemic change or human-centred design? What if we deeply took on board how interconnected and interdependent things are. So that when we have global emergencies governments didn’t have the power to make decisions that might condemn us all to death with on decision. It’s too much power for any one person to have. These are decisions that need to be taken collectively and we must all play our part.

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Life Doula

kimberleen

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I came back to Scotland, joined extinction rebellion and got sent a beautiful letter that was signed off, with Love & Rage. It gave me all the feels.

 

There is more than one life doula out there. I might not be able to say exactly what they do or how they do it but it’s certainly a thing. More recently I came towards the idea that the best way to really describe a Life Doula is as a Trauma Doula. Life can be very traumatic you know? The number one cure for trauma a secure attachment and that is the core of my work. I will literally sit with you in the dark, you can cry on me, snot up my favourite clothes and I will be very happy to be of service. Yes, I do appropriate hugging and holding. It’s all part of the healing process.

Not only that this year, yes  2020 I’ve finally been able to reach out to both Birth and Death Doula’s who get it. That makes me happy because have felt tribeless as I push towards the kind of care I know the traumatised deserve.  I’ve been claimed and that makes me feel like I have a tribe. It’s better than that though, I have found The Red Tent Doulas and am going to be training with them this year as both a birth doula and a death doula. Which makes me very very excited. What makes me most excited is the Alexandra Wilson who is also of Sacred Circles described “Doula work is like a trojan horse” that the work of the doula does much to bring into question current systemic approaches to life as we currently understand it. Doula work asks us to step away from the idea that we are human robots and take us back to both our origin stories and end stories. That we all belong and that in the process of being born, living and dying we are all far more deeply connected than we might like to acknowledge.

Healing both our lives and for me at least acknowledging our life-cycles is a very important part of our innate sovereignty as humans. You see the work that I do has hashtags for days. All of is important because all of us are important. We are living lives in defiance of our very nature. It’s why we are sicker, unhappier and yet at the same time healthier than ever. A return to some form of understanding of our sacredness can do us every kind of good as long as it is not informed by dogma. There is no right or wrong way to do things. No right or wrong way to be. Even no choice, is a choice but to be careering along with no connection to your greater being is something other. We were not intended to live like this. Being a Doula is taking ourselves to a very basic understanding of the deep value of life. That as human bodies we are witness to something, profound and unique. That we only have one of. That only we know. That only we get to live. Doula’s honour that process. We honour life. We want to use our lives to honour you in your deepest vulnerability. We are here in service, for the love of humanity.

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The Life Doula: Creating Connection

kimberleen

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It’s an interesting thing to sit at the core of what you do and understand that it is about something as basic as creating connection. Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that therapy is only needed as a result of the conversations that we are unable to have with a secure attachment. A secure attachment is someone we trust, that cares about us, that believes in us and wants nothing more than for us to be both healthy and happy. The sad truth that secure attachments have become rare.

More than this I have known for quite some time the power of deep conversation, that isn’t so much therapeutic as it is real. You see we all grasp for depth especially when life has challenged us. Secure attachments are the number one thing that guarantees our success in life as well as minimises the impacts of trauma. Do you know who your secure attachments are? Do you have a good friend? A relative or even a work colleague who is there for you?

Most of us are so caught up in the superficial we barely make time for the real stuff. We barely make time for eye contact or the space to feel exactly where we or someone is at. We are so controlled by time and external commitments we are unable to see or experience the things that are right in front of us. The things that are just as magical as all the others, if we took the time to appreciate them. You see life isn’t one long to-do list. Even if it was we have to ask exactly what it is that we are ‘doing’ it for? We cannot take the material with us. It’s just a sideshow to the main event. I wonder sometimes if life is not laid out something like The Crystal Maze. Where these fantasy worlds are created only to distract us and let’s face it it’s easy to get distracted by all the beautiful shiny things. After all, they were all created too. In the meantime, we are walking around in flesh suit ignoring one another even though we know that we are the most finite thing on the planet. Only existing once. So what is it that drives us away from one another? What drives us to disconnect us from the uniquely exquisite human connections that we face every day?

This year has been a breakthrough year for me. Most of my breakthroughs delivered to me by way of my own clients. That most of our sources of pain are systemic rather than personal. That our childhood wounds are not necessarily the results of bad parenting, rather the results of the inhumane conditions in which parents are expected to parent. We can’t hold our parents accountable for the circumstances and systems that they too were/are struggling to survive in. That we can only take responsibility for our own healing, that everyone’s healing is unique and that I heal to be taught as much as I am to teach. I have learned that trauma is about spectrum and range and that we simply can’t help people if we do not understand the depth of their feeling. That you can never walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes, you can only share the road. That is what connection is all about. Taking the time to experience one another.

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Creating The New

kimberleen

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The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. – Socrates

Many of us believe that the world and it’s current systems are in the process of undergoing critical collapse. Of course the world, media is largely lying to us about this while openly telling the truth. Yet many of us are in despair. Even last night I was talking to a new collaborator about his imagined terror of a world with no order and how the current human population might cope without the existing structures. Me on the other hand I’m feeling quite chipper and excited about the whole prospect. The idea of Earthly liberty are what my Earthly dreams are made of.

You see I’ve been working hard at this human thing. I’ve also been working hard on what might be the right thing to do at any given moment with regards to the planetary situatuion. That does not mean to say that I always get it right either. Fare from it. What experience has taught me is that fighting what is is both exhaustive and pointless. That we are far better capable and efficient at building new lives, new pathways and new communities than anything else.

You might ask: What’s the point? and spin yourself into a sate of anxiety paralysis and indeed you may be totally correct in your assumptions. Then on the other hand do you want to spend your life staring at the bedroom ceiling. Or indeed looking our wistfully from the living room window in hope of a better world? There is now way round it. The world is changing as it always has. Now faster than ever. Tech is changing everything and before you know it we are all going to be half cyborg is smart phones haven’t made that abundantly clear already. Here we are humans the cutting edge of life force as we currently know it, trying to figure out how best to use our time. Did I mention that time is imaginary…

We are literally getting ready to enter a new paradigm where thw world becomes a far fairer, happier and interconnected. In case you didn’t know it always has been it’s just that the dark forces that be have been busy convincing us other wise. Creating the new is largely about believing that another way is possible that threats, dominance and coercive control ware all rapidly becoming things of the past as we learn how to connect with ourselves again. That new sacred councils are coming forward in families, communities and nations. That in order for us to get through what is coming next we have to view the world very differently and that wellbeing economies have got to be at their core.