Tag: Community Activist

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End Of An Era

kimberleen

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It really is. A decade at an end. The truth of the matter is, I have no idea where I might be when you read this. I writing this nearly three weeks ago, as I sit on a precipice of something entirely new and unclear. Most of this year I have eluded to the fact that things have not gone exactly to plan in my life and yet still I find myself unwilling to share my story. It’s actually all lined out for the first of next years blog posts, hopefully, that will keep you tuned in for some major revelations.

In the last post, I talked about the power of connection. That is what I specialise in. Holding space, creating space and making time for change. If there was ever a time for change it is now. My personal crisis bathes in minutia as we look at things on a planetary scale. We have a climate crisis, globally polarised politics and a whole new generation seeking to be heard as Millenials begin to take a backstage. Millennials for obvious reason have dominated the last decade, largely considered entitled, among other things that don’t come to mind as easily. Even the other day I was talking to someone who had been in Bali to discover a tribe of Global Nomads, as I talked about taking more of my work online.

Twenty years ago I fantasied about being a travel writer and then demonised myself for thinking that anybody else would be interested in what I have to say. Writing was for the confident, the well educated and somehow the endorsed.  That we needed people to believe in us to move forward in life. I was not wrong. My lack of secure attachment, runaway lifestyle, (rather than nomadic) hindered me from progression in ways that I was not yet fully able to recognise or understand. What I realise now twenty years later is that somehow, that probably made me, far more interesting than your stock standard public school alumni writer. Yet even as I developed as a writer I found Guardian articles blasé and lacking depth as a result of the endorsement that only middle-class living can buy. I didn’t know then that how I felt was symptomatic of a broken system that disenfranchised the different, demonised the disengaged and stopped us from connecting. It’s only in very recent weeks that I’m beginning to understand that how I feel have far more to do with neuroscience than it has to do with personality. That brain science and personal perception are the universes playing out in the micro what is happening in the macro. That we are all reflections of ourselves and that those with the most to say are very rarely heard due to the importance of all matters E- Loc. That as humans we are controlled by so many things external to ourselves. That the need for endorsement is a form of psychosis visited on us not just by our primitive and infant’s brain yet by society itself.

It’s the end of an era. I really do hope so. I want the system to fail, for human spirit thrive and end the robotic and enslaved existence of the human’s soul. I’ve been told it’s all happening in January 2020. I won’t be stockpiling food. I’ll be hoping for the best, diving into my soul and surrendering to flow and be here somewhere in the either for anybody that needs me. The thing is about the Global Nomad thing is that most of us are deeply disconnected sitting in cafes or air BnB’s narrating lives that don’t really exist. Where tea with your mother is destroying the planet and your digital devices are implicit in illegal wars and child labour. Our privilege keeps people enslaved. There is in this current system no way round that. Ten years on from a decade ago we really are only just beginning to understand how the greed induced tyranny of most of human existence needs to be broken down.

On a personal level, this decade has been a decade of love, deep unadulterated love. The kind that heals souls, brings a person home and brings a sense of belonging that stills the heart long enough to hear itself. If there is one thing that I could to take into the next ten years it is love and love alone. Right now we all have the ability to chose the paradigm in which we want to live. For me, that is about giving all my power to my own personal truth that love and joy must guide the way. That personal frequency is everything.

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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.

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The Global Village

kimberleen

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Globalisation and colonialism are permanent fixtures in my life. Living in Observatory, Cape Town I live in one of the oldest human settlements in the world. Quite literally the birthplace of the village and where hunter-gathers walked out of the bush to settle down. No agriculture, just a whole load of land to forage and some cattle to tend too. Fast forward a few thousand years and the culture and history has been all but obliterated by development, all as a result of the expansion of empire, first the Portuguese, then The Dutch and lastly the Britsh. The Khoi San seems to be a tribe lost in time to the trauma of colonialism and development. Even now what are protected Khoi San sites are under threat of development for the ever-present threat of the land developer. You see the land isn’t automatically protected and communities are not automatically awarded a say in how their place should be developed or not. Even when that land is the site of the oldest village in the world. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Add the strain of apartheid and the pressure to create ’employment’ and the unresolved trauma of the capitalist system that has been largely enforced on the world. It’s a global challenge and here I am as The life Doula sitting right at the centre of it. We all are.

As an immigrant to South Africa, I have been reluctant to take my place at the council table. There are so many more voices that need to be heard than mine. There is so much more healing that has to happen in front of mine and there is so much more growth that has to happen in front of mine. I take a back seat wherever I can and I think very carefully about what I have to offer. Where I offer it. Why I offer it and if indeed it is appropriate at all, given that I am in essence a colonialist. Only here as the result of privilege and the legacy of empire and of course love. I am a love migrant after all chasing the dream of a happily ever after.

Yet the Amazon is on fire and it feels like your rolling the dice on who you want to share the apocalypse with rather than the rest of your life. It’s not just the Amazon it’s everywhere. From Scottish Land Reform, Standing Rock, Botswana, Aboriginal tribes of Australia or protecting Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The challenge is global and there is nowhere left to run. We have gone full circle and land management, rewilding and human connection all lie at the centre of the solution.

Greta Thurnberg is crossing the ocean in a racing yacht to spread the message of being Earthbound. Yet here in Observatory tens of people arrive everyday soaring in with lofty ideas of ascensions and personal expansion, transplanting their own trauma on a place that has enough of its own. No matter where you are the human journey at this point in time appears to be the same. What we can’t fix we run from. That strategy isn’t working anymore and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. About how my ‘business’ fits into this. That increasingly I seem to be moving backwards and forwards through my own timeline as much as anybody else. That I am deeply excited for the next 15 years of human evolution and yet so much of the progress lies in unlocking human trauma and healing humans. While recreating sacred cycles and circles. Moving backwards and forwards through time, recalibrating the past, changing the future. Getting to grips with systematic trauma. It’s real.  We are the challenge. We are the cause. We are most certainly the cure. We can be human again. And although it’s a  bit of a pun in the mindfulness game. Our challenge is to be here now.

This is the work of The Life Doula upskilling humaness witnessing the circles and the cycles and most importantly making the circle bigger while standing in its centre.

 

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Imagination, Flow and Trauma.

kimberleen
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Dancing alone in the dark at an aquarium filled with poisonous, even killer jelly fish. It could be magical? It could be a nightmare? It all depends on how you look at it. It all depends on where the imagination takes you. Imagine if you felt safe. You see for many people safety is not a given.

I have lists of good ideas, half drafted, that never landed. When I sat down to write about the idea I became stuck. The words never came. The idea never flowed and imagination never took me on the adventure I was hoping for. Since the New Moon in Leo at the beginning of August magic is manifesting. Ascension journeys have been both palpable and tangible within my friend group and clients. While the trauma trap plays havoc with others. Heart Chakras have literally been popping. Thinking has been made redundant, as we feel our way into the next paradigm. Manifesting everything we can touch with our hearts. Has this been happening for you?

The Aquarian full moon invites us to gain an overview. For me, my crown chakra has blasted open in ways I’ve never experienced before. My sleep cycles seem to be filled with dreams and revelation of other worlds. Imagination seems to be key in focusing on new pathways of being. That we need to go beyond ourselves and somehow we can’t think our way there. Only feel it. We have to imagine it, touch it with our hearts and breath in the colours as frequency.  Bright, crystal clear, tangible. That what ever we can conceive we can achieve. We need a compelling future, to strive towards.

Trauma steals all of the above from us, as we rerun the past so that it becomes concurrent with our future. Trauma is tricksy like that. The nightmare is the dream. The dream becomes the reality. How do we forget when we live it daily. How do we breathe in something new when the past takes up all the space in our heads? How do feel something different when the expansion of love impels us with the swords of pain? Yes as the Three of Swords would suggest in the Tarot. The new paradigm calls. What if we can’t feel our ways there? It feels like the separation of heaven and hell.  A thin line we dance and create ourselves.

I’ve been fortunate enough to suffer from severe depression in my own life. A regular Eyore, defeatest, lost, hopeless and even hapless. Where existential crisis of the human experience was tangibly pointless, heavy, a dead end. Now I seem to live in the polarity of that. The connectedness of it all. Then I considered triggers. Where synchronicity is now magical through the lense of trauma thier bombshells and an explosion into hell. The human experience is complex. Signs and symbols are gateways of meaning that we use to tell stories. Deeply personal ones. It may be a news flash to some that we are in charge of those meanings. We get to decide. The water in the tap can be something to be grateful for or it can be mass poison used for mind control. Our feelings dictates how we integrate the information that has been given to us. Trauma is a human hell that we can’t think our way out of. Where we flow and synchronise our pain back to us. Yup life can be that cruel. In these situations, we humans with the abilty to use connection for good need to learn the ebb of love. That there are some places that it can’t reach even if it can be felt. That’s why when we truly love we have to learn how to sit with people in the dark because the only thing they’ve ever loved are monsters.

Process, Uncategorized

Community Building

kimberleen
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New office. Yes, I am still going on about this. Thank you for all the well wishes and visits it’s been amazing to get all the love and support. As well as be assured of the value I offer. Community building is a very real part of what I do and I’m really pleased to be able to rent my office from an organisation that share the same values as me. Wellbeing Economy all the way.

The world is a mess. I stopped paying attention to the news a very long time ago. The point of my official disengagement was when Trump got elected. Though every so often Brexit gets the better of me and climate change alarms me. Then I remember how much of it is true anyway? What do ‘they’ want us to believe now? This has been something I’ve been playing with for a while. As a radical curator, I used to often think about news and global events in terms of a real-time existence. What is actually affecting me, in my now? What is real to me at this moment? This physicality, this moment, this day, this environment. It’s something that I have done my best to adopt over the last ten years. That the things that are upsetting us are constructs. When the things that we can impact with our attention are real and immediate. That’s how I got really into community building. That community building is the best panacea that I know, along with conversation and a good nights sleep. That in isolation most humans live within the reach of terror, with anxiety and depression as intimate friends. May we could only pick up the phone and call anxiety and depression? What do you think they would say? The things we have to reach into and delve in to face our own challenges.

For the largest part of my life, I felt isolated, removed from the collective. The more isolated I felt, the more isolated I became. That my inner landscape was reflected in the world outside of me or was it the other way round. I didn’t fit. Why is that? I don’t tolerate hypocrosy well.

That common sense dictated that our approach to our local environments were deeply flawed. That what we were taught in school and what we were expected to aspire to was contradictory. That although I was expected to have moral value I was to be squashed questioning the value systems of authority. That no big company I have ever worked for has been able to hold to its values. That NGO’s swim in emotional toxicity of the unresolved trauma of the people that run them. All along the watchtower people will sacrifice everything for financial security and a stable home. Imagine that. That those are the two pillars that keep people chained to dying broken system. That nobody wants to swim the moat if it means giving up emotional safety.

There it is humans are hard-wired for safety. Yet empirical structures have managed to isolate us completely in our search for that. That seperated they can control us through isolation and distance. It’s the basic principle of divide and rule. What if you realised we are all bordering on terrified? As dogma attached to exponential economic growth can increasingly be identified as a concern for human society and our only home planet Earth. One has to wonder when will we stop eating the poisoned fruit. Where do we realise our financial security is important and our emotional safety is a valuable resource. That self-healing can only fully be achieved in conjunction with a supportive community of people on the same mission.

Process, Uncategorized

Systemic Trauma and a Road Trip Through South Africa

kimberleen
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Virginia Mutwa and Credo Mutwa live in Kuruman, the same town where Mary Moffat wife to David Livingstone, lived with her Father, Robert Moffat and the Kuraman Moffat Mission Station, that was founded with the funds from The London Mission Society. It was here the The Bible was translated into Setswana. Which was then used as a tool to convert the Tswana to Christianity.

For the first time in a very long time, I was off in search of wisdom outside of myself. Where I thought the answers might come from someone else other than me. This was a process that I started a few months back when I decided to undertake some Family Constellation work. During this process, I was fortunate enough to meet a pretty elusive creature in the realms of healers. A land healer who came with a massive piece of selenite, who low and behold had lived in Cornwall and learned her craft from an Englishman who was living there. Oh, the irony. Why are we all so busy trying so hard to fix somewhere other than here?

It was after this session that some strange channelling happened. (I’ve already told some strange things were going on in my life).  We were talking about land healing, systemic trauma and the return of the light (that’s a thing) and how all the work that we do is directly connected to healing the Earth, when somehow Credo Mutwa came up and next minute he seemed to be talking to me (Yup I was channelling).  That created the beginnings of last weeks mini-adventure and an intention was set that I/we might actually go to see him. As people within the group had already met and had contact with him.

Two weeks that intention was manifested at literally sonic speed that started with a phone call to one of my healer friends, who had continued to express an interest in going.  The intention was set. Phone calls were made and from nowhere it was a potential fantasie to go. You see not everybody gets to see Credo, only those who are invited too. That’s what they say anyway. In the meantime, I felt like I was being energetically checked out. Yup, I’m beginning to really believe that that is a thing.

So just like that, we hit the road and never looked back. Then of course as always, it hit me. Narratives, language, the imaginary lines of state and the brokeness of us all. Including me.

What you really need to know is that South Africa is a complicated place. Far more complicated than most people can ever imagine and a road trip is just the kind of adventure that brings that right back to the fore again. For the most part I am lost in a sea of “white” people who live in fear, who have no insight into their own systemic trauma, of not fully belonging and spend a lot of their time writing off “Africans” for not being able to to pick up their own rubbish and the ongoing dialogue of plastic pollution, their poor education and of course underlying threatening nature when in uncontained groups. You think I’m kidding maybe? I’m not.  It’s something you might term as “Systemic Racism” which is really just a way of talking about trauma in relation to race. Do you want to know one of the most fucked up things about South Africa or in fact racism? Is that race isn’t really a thing? In fact, skin colour strangely is not representative in any way of a cultural group. This is the fuck up of identity politics. Instead, people go around talking about “Africans” as if that is somehow definitive. Like white South African’s are actually European. It’s a weird idea, as many of them have never been to Europe.

Yet here we are off to expropriate wisdom from Credo Mutwa because we are unable to find it for ourselves.

In recent weeks I’ve recently started thinking about the idea of skin shaming as a term. It’s so much more accurate. There can be no dividing lines between humans. All humans are supposedly genetically 10% Khoi San, we are all from here in Observatory where I write this blog from. The oldest human settlement in the world. Yes, that. We are all one tribe.

Then for the 50 millionth times, I had to doggedly explain the impacts of trauma. That sometimes I thank my lucky stars that I am and “Indigent White” (another new term I’ve been figuring out) that understand how complex it is to be a bastard Scot, (Half English, Half Scottish) never mind anything else. Then I have to remember all the traumas of the empire. All the way back to the crucifixion and before that the idea that we have to use our own children as a human sacrifice to know god (Just a couple of ideas embodied in religious (Empire) abuse). The land grabs, the displacement, the exile, the colonialism, the oppression of culture, the loss of language, the forced labour, the concentration camps, the industrial revolution, the enforced education and removal of children. That very few people to this day have got smart to the idea of divide and rule. That very few people are able to see through the lens of their own systemic prejudices (even me), that often revolve around the importance of hierarchies and of course the fawning effect it incurs (which can now easily be attributed as a trauma response). For me, my trauma response has always been the railing against the existence of them. As I fall further and further down the rabbit hole of trauma. I’m single-handedly teaching myself not to be a human granade. How to remove myself, protect myself and love myself in the face of the insurmountable odds of all the traumatised people that engulf me. We are all fucked up we are all traumatised. Now its something many of us openly admit. Then you have to wonder what if we weren’t what if we all knew love, intimately? What if we all felt joy daily? What if we all were able to see another’s pain as our own.

So you’re probably wondering about Credo? A lot more happened on a life time scale than you might imagine for an impromptu visit with South Africa’s last Sanusi. I read that again and realise how strange it was to think that this meeting and the events round it might be ordinary. Personally, I’m more intrigued about Virginia his wife and why she uses an English name instead of her own? and why I didn’t write down the spelling of her real name so I could write it here unbastardised, honoured and witnessed. None of us are untouched by trauma, especially the great ones. It runs through us like great tsunamis of wisdom if we could only stay afloat in its torrents.