Tag: Healing Humans

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How To Contribute To Planetary Shift

kimberleen

It’s all about frequency. In the case of the Cape Town water crisis that surrounded the frequency of visits to the bathroom. In your case, it’s probably not going to be that hard to master. Not drinking water in the middle of a drought. Think happy thoughts. Yeah, that’s a bit fucked up coming from a trauma-informed practitioner… Of course planetary shift isn’t all about positivity and solution-focused mentality. In fact, these days planetary shift for those of us willing to face terror face on is all about the climate emergency. Like other things you may think what has the climate emergency got to do with trauma? Where I have to invert the question, why do you think it doesn’t.

In fact much of what I do would say quite the oppostie. It’s time to dance with the shadow after all we a planet of contrast. Night, Day, Ocean, Land, Hot, Cold, Wet, Dry we live in a planetary space of polariastion and we have done for billions of years. Yes you and all your previous layers of evolution. It’s nothing to do with polarisation it’s about being able to accept the polarisation within you. I know you probably want to hear that contributing to planetary shift might be all about swimming with dolphins, meditating on mountains and of course running off to Bali. However what are you doing to feel better? That is all there is to it? What makes you feel good without increasing the Carbon footprint? (I truly do wonder for the world when I consider this (it’s really easy stop flying)).

What if you just sat down for a bit, without screen time, with the radio off and your phone deep underwater somewhere? What would happen then? How long would it take for someone to turn up at your door? Like seriously? Good experiment in a global pandemic. Have we got compassion fatigue yet? Fuck knows, it’s exhausting just maintaining our own space right now. By space I mean immediate space I mean in the physical realms. Brush your hair, make your bed, wash your clothes, stay sane that kind of thing. I managed to tidy my room today. That’s correct not the house. My room. That’s where I am at how about you?

You see we set our goals high (at least I do) and think that we can bring about planetary shift through a forced kind of militancy. Even if it’s just by holding our daily routines in place. We are told to dream big, aim higher or get out of our own way. Often. The last few years have been a roler coaster ride of what you should be doing for yourself, your community and for the planet. Including getting vaccianted and not questioning our right to bodily autonomy. In the next few weeks and years we will be encouraged to support Ukraine, the way we did Palestine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan when none fo those situations have been fully resolved to this day. Nor have the victims received the indepth trauma care required.

For over a decade now I’ve been watching Life Coaches, Spiritual Advisors and Gurus all dish out there advise as to what the meaning of life is. How to be happier? How to manage anxiety? How to identify high functioning depression? Explaining that addiction is emotional numbing. What I’ve learned? Is that most of these forms of personal development are directly related to how you participate in the capitalist system. What can you consume to make you feel better? Who knew that learning to breath properly is actually a chargeable product? You’d think someone would just help you breath? Especailly at a time were being able to breath is a critical life skill to tackle a respiratory virus. It appears not. Which leaves me personally with a lot of questions? Where is the collective human consciousness when we are charging people to improve their breathing. Just saying? How low have we sunk in our ability thrive if the most basic of human needs at the center of a global crisis still falls within the bounds of chargeable product? Very few coaches that I have encountered have ever truly got to the core of our human issues. Most of them are just tiptoing around healing fads to figure out how to profit. People might talk about slowing down for personal well-being without mentioning the benefits of local community living. People might talk about creating heartbased frequencies without explaining how to apply them in a practical level. How do we generate loving environments when our vibe is based on being handed the perfect coffee.

More than this how do we address the seemingly perverse approaches of most western societies to promote an experimental vaccine with unknown health risks over access to clean air, clean water, sufficient personal space and a healthy diet? We are told to breath in, the air is poisonous. We are told to control our thoughts when the world is playing mindgames. It’s hard to practice wellness and even safety in a word the practices harm withour consequences. We are told to maintain our frequency as disregulated light workers attempting to avoid pain. t’s hard to practice wellness and even safety in a world that practices harm without consequences. We live in a traumagenic world. Where each individual act that we take ripples outward with untold consequences, in unseen spaces that don’t apply to us. My current macbook (which I am using now) was created through exploitative extractive economies that benefit from human right violations. Yet I continue to use it and remain an Apple customer. I am complicit in the toxic systems that I attempt to disrupt.

I have often heard the wiccan wisdom “Do as you will and harm no one” As I travel through this life this simple suggestion for a living way forward is far more complex than many might imagine. After all “Salad is murder”. Never has this become more clear than with the growing interest in plant medicine and never has it been so misunderstood. The modern homo sapien thinks that plant medicine is a consumptive process that does not allow for the consent of the plant medicine. There has also grown to be an outsourcing of intution that goes with it. “My guides” strikes huge alarm bells from the get go. What guide exactly? I mean exactly? And are you sure that this isn’t the plant talking to you? You see going inwards can be an avoidence of what is, much like alcohol consumption or an over eager stoner.

I don’t think it’s any great news to explain that over the last eighteen months many of us have been going through a ‘shamanic’ breakthrough. Yes, the world is fucked. Yes, we all knew about it. Yes, we have all been complicit in it. Yes, everything is connected. No, that doesn’t mean you feel perpetual joy and wonder. Actually your ‘spiritual’ awakening is about becoming clear; you’ve got a shit tonne of work to do. Yes, you have a calling. Yes, that calling is to find your purpose. I know right? Who knew it was that simple? More than this you need to stick to your guns. Stay comitted, even when it is hard to stay motivated.

So really what I am saying is how about you combine you self-medicating with some community building. How do we do that? How do we contribute to planetary shift when so much of our world is dictated to us through the back rooms of power? I have to stay connected. Not online, out there in the ‘real’ world. Breath the air, clean the air you have. Drink the water, find your nearest fresh water supply is. Stand on the ground, find some a patch of earth that has a complete biome, that hasn’t been curated into being by some town planners idea of green space. When we begin to look at personal wellbeing indepthy we begin to appreciate that much of it is caught up in our living and working environments that are not designed to foster wellbeing either. We are beginning to realise that we cannot buy our way of a planet with finite resources. Nor can we avoid the consequences of living in a unified planetary field. The smoke of the Amazonian fires cross the atlantic and end up in southern Africa. Climatic changes that occur over the Atlantic, as a result, create hurricanes that wipe out the Southern States of the USA. Everything is connected. The dilusion that we have any control at all is a big one. Yet freakishly self-control is pimped as a superwork, when medical textbook might say the opposite, especially in relation to trauma.

Its easy to believe that planting a million trees is the way forward. Its also easy to get caught up in the well being or some poor unfortunately orangtuan. The things is what I know for sure is that whatever you think the problem is. It is never very far away. You don’t have to get on an intercontinental flight in order to make a difference. Begin where you are. Begin with yourself. You see so many of us are coming from a space of spiritual lack as much as physical lack. That we don’t know where to belong, what to stand for and more importantly who will stand with us. We only have to turn to Jerry McGuire to learn how little most people are moved by or inspired into change. Most of us are just looking for a safe base from which we can view tha madness. Until the madness comes for us. If you are reading this I trust that you are already all to aware of what a precarious point in humanity we exist in. This weeek alone I have heard of terms such as the end of civilisation, and the end of history as Vladimer Putin plays power games with his nuclear deterent. In such times many of us are asked to examine what really matters? We are asked to examing how we feel. And for many people that can look very different too.

In order to contribute to planetary shift we have to begin to appreciate that if it is about frequency. You get clear on what you want to create, whether it’s a clean room or a happy life. That means finding out what makes you happy is the most important part of that calling. More than this finding a team of people who are going to support you in that mission is paramount. Find your thing, then you’ll find your people. You need to have people that share in that dream that are working to create it. We cannot get there alone. I don’t know if you noticed it’s fucking crazy out there. Masks on, masks off, pandemic or plandeminc, anti-vaxers vs the anti-human, fake news vs your own inteliigence. Our whole world is being held in relief to be questioned, dismantled, weaponised and if needs be detonated. Lucky the UN have already outlawed nuclear weapons. Has anybody told Boris? The buzz word for the last year or two has been polarisation. It’s not something that I buy into.

Purpose and meaning are now touted as cure all approaches. Paolo Nutini to has been weighing on my mind “Nobody can give you the power to rise.” So that’s where the fuck are you in your life? Where do you want to be? Are we moving forward? And yet that may be part of it. However, is what are you doing making you feel better? That is all there is to it? What makes you feel good without increasing the Carbon footprint?

This article was written to accompany the Trauma Wise Circle by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

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Healing Humans

kimberleen

The source to all planetary problems are human. I remember where I was when I figured out this little nugget. I was living in Cornwall in a recording studio that was at the center of an eclectic creative and maritime community that was fighting the mass eviction at the hands of a land developer. This experience gave me a deeper awareness of the ever changing relationships humans have with land and the growing discussion and concern around ideas of gentrification.

That land consumption as we understand it was fueled by a combination of the capitalist system and the human experience of land trauma. That the displacement of the emotional trauma that accompanied land trauma was being thus transferred to other places and cultures, through a culture of ignorance and denial. The attitudes of planning authorities and local councils were causing a never ending wave of community destruction and cultural decline.

The mass exodus of London to Cornwall seemed to take on a very real personification of these issues. Where house prices and the average local wage was at the time one of the most disparate in the UK.

It was during this time that I realised that you cannot solve land trauma or any kind of trauma by buying your way out of it. All you do is displace it. It amazes me to this day that people are still under the growing illusion that you can buy yourself out of the system. Indeed in the last decade or so it has been both encouraging and disheartened to see the volume of friends that have managed to get off grid. That getting off grid offers their own personal solution.

Of course  whatever we do in the micro informs the macro. Off grid self sufficiency has informed a kind of colonialist overlay of the back lanes of rural areas everywhere. The low impact gentrification of The New Earth. The New Earth relationships that seem to be devoid of any acknowledgement of ancestors, community and the emotional trauma that bore the unacknowledged pain of the opt out systems. As we abandon our parents, interfamilial connections and intergenerational responsibilities in favour of a trauma free lifestyle. Most people aren’t interested in healing. They are interested in obliterating, obscuring and ignoring the obvious. In fact they are quite used to demanding other people do the work that they won’t. As COVID 19 has also taught us about the plight of Essential Workers. Yup it’s brutal out there and yet I love humans and their strange interpretations of the world.

So it was through this experience that I came to the conclusion that Healing Humans on an interpersonal level was paramount to minimising collective trauma. At the time I had no idea how, when or what that realisation might pull into fruition. At the time it was merely my core understanding of the root problem, humans. That if I wanted to change the world I needed to figure out healing and that at the very center of that, was probably my own.

Of course this projection onto others is very much part of my own shadow work. I realise that mitigating my shadow work  successfully is very much bound up in identity politics.

That my shadow is probably on a projected course of caring less. Yes it’s a very strange thing for me as an impassioned person to find myself saying. That I should care less. That I should stop convincing, cajoling and coercing people to care as much as I do. That in fact there is deep disrespect in believing I know better, when I can’t do better. That I have to continue to alter my internal dialogue about others as part of my own betterment. I am not perfect. I am still privileged. More recently it has been easier to reconcile my dis-ease between the colanised and the coloniser since my return to Scotland and that tells me a lot.

Healing Humans is also the name of my own facebook group, which I have been neglecting as I write for you.

It’s been a layered strange process trying to figure out Facebook group dynamic and I still have no idea where it belongs in the realism of my digital offerings.  I’m still trying to figure out what to do with it and if indeed it is much service or use to anyone. Like much of what I do it has been a long journey of feathering the nest of my own understanding in order to present my ideas of systemic trauma to the world.

It seems to me that  the concept of Healing Humans is a massive commitment to recovery, largely because we stand in a place where we have no idea what has actually been lost. I write this sitting deep in the shadow of my trauma, rather than the trauma itself. You see, even the shadow has shadow. If you have been following me for a while you won’t be surprised when I tell you that my shadow stems from both the systemic and the societal. That our shadows are actually the light sparks of something far more sinister (Yes the anti-human system).

In recent weeks my work has come to a new level and I find myself not so much in the work of a doula, an incident based approach to trauma work. I now find myself in the process of surrogacy. I sit with people as they try to figure out who and where they are in relation to a system that is doggedly set on extracting power by exploiting them. That the system itself imbues family structures and is able to define intimate relationships as both consumptive and performative. Where family dynamics play out like the dynamic on an Instagram account, rather than the endlessly loving and supportive ideas of family that we have been gaslight to believe in.

Many of us are wearily attempting to dodge the role of the oppressor ourselves. Breaking the cycles of intergenerational and systemic trauma like canaries down a coal mine.

As I write this I see I am sitting now in the deeply woven fabric of the interpersonal cognitive dissonance that is required to uphold an anti-human system. Where people have been systematically undermined by their parents, the education system, the work systems and community systems. To find themselves somewhere way beyond the edge of what they thought to be true. The things they were convinced of, that aren’t too convincing. The things that drive you mad if you just took sometime to attempt to reason with them. Unlocking, disengageing and dismantling the system is a process that starts from within. Where we discover that love isn’t what we thought it was. That approval isn’t required for you to be held. Our secure attachments need to move beyond societal compliance. The levels of trauma that we experience both personal, familial, societal, professional and indeed systemically are way far beyond what most of us can cope with on our own. That’s why I am a Life Doula.

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I Heal Humans

kimberleen

It’s such weird thing to have to say. I heal humans. As much as I’ve been banging on about the importance of niching my business; the reason it’s been so difficult is how do I decide who is worthy of my attention? If someone is in need how do you go about deciding if there are parameters for whom I care?

There are many ways to heal. Yet I believe that the primary way to do that is story. That you need to tell your story. More than this, that you need to feel your story. You need to witness all the things that we have internalised, ignored and tolerated in order to survive. So many of us know the things that have happened to us and yet so few of us feel worthy of feeling heard.

I often say that we only have to go to therapy to share all the things that we were not allowed to say. In response to telling your story you need to be heard.

So often in life our emotional wounds are not taken seriously. Only physical wounds are recognised as painful and in need of healing. That talking about how we feel is in someway toxic. You see that the thing we’ve been gaslighted into believing that conversation is unnecessary and at worst weak. The truth is that our emotions are toxic to a functional system. That is why they are deemed unnecessary. The thing is that because our relationships are so often caught up  in the idea of trying to be kind or even keeping order, we often aren’t able to speak our minds. If we can’t speak we don’t get the opportunity to make the right next step or even be asked a ‘better’ question. If you were able to feel through your daily life you would act very differently to how you have to ‘operate’? Each choice we make we are giving our power and sovereignty away and corroding the power of others in the process. So many of us are out there pointing fingers, angered by hypocrisy and corruption, completely unaware that we are complicit in an anti-human system.

More than this I feel that traditional psychological practices are very limited in their approach to human healing. They are corrupted by the structure of the system too. They don’t account for trauma and nor do they account for the deepening levels of secure attachment and trust required for someone to truly emotionally heal.

It’s time for that to change. I am a bit unusual in my approach to healing. I’m a story listener.

I truly believe that story is the way into deep healing. That we hold all the things that we think have been stolen, misplaced and even lost to us. It’s only a matter of speaking the words and hearing yourself and reflectively listening to all the wisdom that lives inside us. I like to listen and question and understand you. I want to be able to relate to what you have to say. Finding the deeper meaning in your thoughts, feelings and even ‘truths’. To see where they are truly guiding us and if indeed you want to go where your mind is taking you. That’s all a good conversation is a deeper questioning of self. I like to think of the conversations I offer as headspace. I offer the time you need to get perspective and see things in a new or different way. To help you understand yourself. In my experience all we need is a very good and often long conversation to find our way back there again. The truth is that we are powerful beyond our most wild imaginings.

So that’s it I heal humans though listening, accompanied with a cup of tea.

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The Personal Is The Planetary

kimberleen

Can you see through the mist in your mind?

It’s ok my brain can’t taken either. All the stuff that I am supposed to be responsible for. All the things that I am responsible for healing. I get exhausted just listening to all the way in which we could, can and should ‘fix’ things. We stop eating meat and as a result create massive mono-crops. We head off to save The Amazon and burn more than our fair share of jet fuel. We stand in support of  Black Lives Matter and find our input unwanted. We get pushed and pulled in the local throws of planning politics and find our selves exhausted. First of all where the fuck do you start? Second of all does it end? I sense that you might already know the answers to that question.

Once again sovereignty is on my mind. What are we free to do? The answer to that is most things and as we stand on the precipice of action we have to ask ourselves do we have to do everything. The short answer to this is yes. We have to do everything for ourselves. Yet how is that possible.

Last week I found myself once again in the fray of where the political meets the personal. Where internal struggle meets the outward path and I was left wanting. I was left wanting in two ways. Wanting to be something different than what I am. Wanting the world to be different in the way it was. Of course, it was all caught up in the guise of the interpersonal relationship. The very essence of co-creation here on Planet Earth.

You see we are comfortable where we are. We are comfortable that our produce is made in China under an oppressive communist system, that denies human rights and forces people into ‘slave labour’. We are comfortable that the digital platforms are fraught with issues of governance. We are accepting of the corrupt way in which our governments operate. We accept the short-sightedness of the capitalist agenda. We are happy to consume the human experience through biased media. We are comfortable ignoring systemic racism. We are ok with dissenting voices being silenced. We buy into ideas of living our best lives on the backs of other peoples emotional labour. It’s fucked up.

I did a meditation on Saturday night to examine my issues about being unheard. How my micro informs the macro and it turns out that I might have a persecution complex. I’m literally dying to be heard. Is this level of commitment to my truth really necessary? It probably left me with more question than it did answers about my relationship to the anti-human system. It made me think about Jimmy Saville a prolific paedophile that had used his position at the BBC to gain access to vulnerable children. The thing is if you meet someone who worked at the BBC in later half of the 20th Century it was well known what Jimmy Saville was up to. Yet who spoke out? Everybody fucking knew. Yet it was too uncomfortable for anybody to draw any serious attention to it. They might lose their job, credentials or good standing and so the abuse continued.

Of course taking on every single injustice or issue is exhausting so we must be discerning about both out of our interest and our capacity. We need to make our lives sustainable on an immediate level. What makes us uncomfortable? For most of us it is a long list of things that we refuse to give up or even give into.

It came to me that slavery was a result of the Seven Deadly Sins the things we fail to take responsibility for projected onto another human body. That we might be able to own a human soul. We all have a calling it is our soul purpose to find it. We dance round the fire trying not to burn knowing that the flames only impulse is to hurt us.

If you are interested to find out more about this subject you can check out more articles below.

The Story of the Broken Goddess

Personal Activism

Heal Yourself First

Gaia The Traumatised Goddess

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Emotional Labour as a Priority

kimberleen

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The Red Tent Doulas Community know all about emotional labour.

All is not right with the world. The media is gaslighting us along with most governments. The conspiracy theorist are going at it too, it’s all a hoax, to keep us compliant as the reptilian forces continue to clutch at control. I believe you. I’m convinced and it’s exhausting. In the past I fought everything, from NHS cuts to the bombing of Gaza all in the name of doing what is right. Holding back the storm of shit that is destroying humanity and the planet. I have exhausted myself trying to be right and do right. Expecting sane responses in an insane world. I’ve learned over the years that there is not much use in fighting things. I’m far more interested in building things.

That healing ourselves and the connections we have are the key to community and planetary recovery.

I’ve drilled right down into the centre of my need for equality, justice and found that there is everything right with this aspiration. That I as humans we should all be entitled to it. That we have to create it for ourselves. That healing ourselves and the connections we have are the keys to community and planetary recovery. That unless I create it for myself there is no way to share it. That if I wanted to create equality and justice in this world my emotional state has to be at the very centre of that balance. I need to be stable to create stability, to create safety. The micro informs the macro. Our healing is central to the maintenance of humanity.

We create what we focus on. I live my life differently to most people. I prioritise my emotional over just about everything else. My feelings matter because they are the compass of my soul. My soul doesn’t work on clockwork. At best it can be timed by the moon and it cycles and the flow of my womb and all worst of other magic that has been whole scaled denied for the convenience of control. That what makes us safe is not necessarily comfortable and there is always pain in growth. We have to push, lean, relax and even expand into pain to learn it’s lessons and this takes time, the kind of time that you can’t set your watch by. All my effort as a human has to be put into creating the new by clearing out the old. One emotional disturbance at a time that needs to be felt into.

That vision is ensuring that I am continually committed to doing the personal work and emotional labour to ensure that I am in alignment. So that I am always able to have the conversations that have been denied us. So that we can hold circle and protect the balance of our centres.

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Gaia The Traumatised Goddess

kimberleen

 

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It’s my shadow.

 

Last year I wrote The Story of the Broken Goddess. As like most of my blogs it was largely about me. My process, my journey. Over the last year I have been exploring deeply how the micro informs the macro, right down to discovering the term Systemic Trauma. The term Systemic Trauma has liberated me from a lifetime of confusion and gaslighting. Where it is obvious that almost everything in the human world is not as it should be.

That the spiritual belief systems that we are sold as children of peace and love are totally out of odds with the current forces that drive our human world. That greed and acquisition in no way lead to human harmony or even better quality of life. Instead, they leave us on a never-ending trail of consumption of first things and then experience in the hope of hitting the high notes of the emotional human experiences as illustrated in The Story of Stuff. Currently, most human life can be predicted by one succinct dopamine hit after another. We have become nothing more than hedonistic thrill seekers, where even a death to-do list has not escaped our quest of human experience. We always have to be somewhere else to be comfortable. Whatever happened to be here now and honouring our lifestyle choices, that this is indeed good enough? That a sense of worth and the value of human connection around us might be all we need. Right now that is exactly where we are. I live with the deepest hope this is something the human world is now beginning to fully appreciate as part of The Great Pause.

The human world is in crisis and not the planetary system that has supported human life for aeons. It is the human life choices that have come deeply into question in the passing weeks and not the value of our Earthly environment. In fact, being locked in our personally designed human environments must have brought much of human existence into the stark realisation of what there chosen life, that has been successfully enforced by the propaganda of a greedy system.

For years now I have been doing my best to understand what it would take to heal humans of their instinctual blindness and indeed what might be the attitudinal cause of the laissez-faire attitudes, as the thousands of miles of concrete consume our mother Gaia. That fairer humans have been endlessly trying to outrun like The Lost Shamans of Scotland.

It’s easy to say that the world is broken. It’s easy to say that we have offended and brutalised mother earth and that she is fighting back. It’s also easy to believe that everything will go back to normal and that human life will resume unaltered. Where we will be able to travel again. Where we will get right back to poisoning the planet as usual. The harder part is saying the human world is broken and that I was a human have played a role, by disengaging in my own emotional journey, ignoring my family or disengaging in community success. Of course, there are always greater forces outside of us to overcome, the business agenda of greed, the power of corporations and the ineptitude of government and even our internal will to change.

In case you didn’t know already we are paddling ever further into the new age of Aquarius which places humanity at its centre. The times truly are a-changing. The divine feminine continues to be on the rise with Gaia’s resurgence that seems to come hand in hand with the Kali the destroyer; specifically in this case of men. These times seem to be a time of prophecy where myth, legend and even the biblical seem to be more applicable and indeed useful than the fodder and spin of the daily media.

Things are very clearly changing and I have been using this time to continue and deepen my spiritual quest, looking into the mythological histories of Scotland, learning about the Cailleach Bheur. A hag creator goddess who seems to personify winter and fight spring. The more I read about the Cailleach. The more this creator goddess seem to ring true with the singing of my soul in the 3D realm. That Gaia herself maybe a Cailleach and in fact be Kali herself with another name? The creator stories seem to be guiding us all now as we search for the deeper meaning in all of this as we are all collectively figuring out what we are actually doing here in human form on planet Earth at this time?

So very few of us are living the old ways connected to our histories and our lineages. It’s all become tartan and bagpipes and a wee nod to what once was. All this as I personally push through the weight of my own ancestral healing decolonising what is known with what has been lost. It all seems to be making perfect sense now just as the whole world seems to have gone bonkers. Or is it that Karma takes time to take its toll. You see if you’ve done the work this period isn’t a challenge. We shouldn’t have to consume our lives to be well.  We have everything we need and we need to wake up each morning and be grateful for that.

You see one of the core elements of trauma is that if we don’t heal it we transfer it onto other people. Through relationships, intergenerationally and even ancestrally, where we often don’t know what is our trauma and what is somebody elses? We as a species have taken our trauma to a whole new level and displaced onto a planet. It’s easy to both imagine and personify a planet, that it might have feelings, opinions and even responses to our parasitical behaviour. When our parasitical behaviour simultaneously extracts and pollutes using some of the Earth’s greatest gift against her. There is literally only so long that you can gaslight a planet (literally). What kind of toxic system are we in that the source of our nurturance is both, exploited,  objectified and commodified. Isn’t this the story of woman herself? Birthing creation only to have it abandon and destroy her. It’s no way to live and so here we are. Watching the domestic abuse cases rise globally as the lockdown takes its toll. Bringing into stark contrast what can and can’t be tolerated in confinement. That we have finally got to sort our shit out. On the micro and the macro and that is why suddenly we are all being homeschooled, only to discover that we aren’t sure what the lessons mean. There is so much now that is suddenly superfluous. Lives of excess are traumatic. Lives of disconnection are traumatic. Lives of isolation are traumatic. Lives indoors are traumatic. Which begs the question not just what are we doing here but what have we been doing here. When it is obvious that our only asset is life itself? Even Louis Vuitton realised that hand sanitiser was more important than handbags early on in the game. Yet most of us are trailing behind this realisation and lamenting our chipped nails.

Whether the Covid 19 started in a lab, mutated from a pangolin or is indeed caused by 5G. I consider sentient forces all using the phrase “I let go of that which no longer serves me” As we all seem to be surrendering to the universal breath of this collective shadow work. That may be our collective summoning of what is best for us has led us exactly here? That is our heightened sense of separation we understand what actually has the ability to fall away. Maybe it’s a whole species, even entire behaviours and possibilities? I baulk at the idea that we might mourn entire industries. Somewhere in the swathes of information, I’ve been deciphering, I heard that we don’t fully let go of and old branch until a new one has appeared. Right now it’s so exciting just to consider us all dangling like wild monkeys trying to figure out what is the best next move as our instinctual responses get the better of us. Maybe we aren’t waiting for a branch? We are waiting for an eagle to take us far above what we have known before.

Mother Gaia and a cohort of beings and indeed beingness have been waiting for us to listen and listen we must with no question and no answer.

 

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Death Care

kimberleen

 

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I took this photo on a walk to my last in-person Extinction Rebellion meeting. This was when the idea of hospicing humanity was merely an abstraction. I create my reality.

 

Well, now there’s a thing. When life ramps up to full volume and you wonder where your key priorities might be. In my journey as a life doula, I always believed that it was important to train as both a birth and death doula. Now it would appear that these skills are needed now more than ever. Especially surrounding Death Care with more and more reports coming in from Italy that the death system, like the medical system, is close to collapse. People are dying at home, unattended and alone, in one of the best medically equipped countries in the world. They are dying alone with their bodies being left ex

So it now poses all sorts of question about death care and highlights all the reasons why I have chosen my particular path as a life doula and the training that I am now undertaking. That we can’t outsource the human experiences and that the two most profound experiences of  birth and death are things that should stay wherever possible in community. Now more then ever this seems very clear to me. The situation here in the UK right now seems to be under control and contagion rates in Scotland seem to be happening much slower than in England.

The Dentist has just called and cancelled my appointment so they can be used as locum doctors. It’s another little tick as the on the upscaling of this crisis as preparations take a much deeper grip.

My thoughts are also with South Africa right now. It’s a privilege to be living in a first-world country where free health care is accepted as a norm rather than a given. There’s a lot of concern about when COVID 19 hits the townships and what is going to happen there. AIDS, HIV and TB are all going to take there toll on the survival rates. When I think of the measures that the UK government is taking with a fully fledge health care system my heart breaks for South Africa. There are dark days ahead for us all. While many of us are grappling with the impacts of marshall law on our civil liberties. I baulk at the potential death toll and the things people will have lived through at the end of this experience. Many accept that in a country that still struggles immensely with economic and cultural inequality COVID 19 is going to be a massive social leveller. It’s a situation that is going to affect everyone, globally. Few of us are able to buy ourselves out if this one and even if we could? At what cost? As martial law begins to get rolled out on a planetary scale it’s intense. The conspiracy theorist, the sceptics, the cynics and the gullible all take their view. All that we can rely on is our own subjective reality.

For obvious reasons, my phone has been ringing. I’m distracted, grounded and weirdly focused on the conversations that matter, as I do my best to stay present. Emotions are high and I feel the writhing of collective consciousness flowing through my nervous system. It doesn’t feel surreal to me. It feels normal like the world is only just catching up to what life is like for the poor, disabled and the elderly on a daily or even yearly basis. Millions of people live like this locked in their homes and in their neighbourhoods all completely socially isolated all the time. Many of us are going to be lucky enough to die like this, in our gilded cages. Figuring out that all that really matters is life. All of it.

This is a situation that you can’t buy your way out of.

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Self Healer

kimberleen

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There’s has been a lot of rainbow weather lately. I’m going to miss this as follow through on my commitment as a Self Healer. Remember lots of people live lives of isolation and desolation daily.

Yes that is me. I’m fucked up too. I’m traumatised too. No I don’t have all the answers and even if I did I wouldn’t tell them to you anyway. Yup it’s fucked up being fucked up.

All those marketers say to tell your story, make yourself vulnerable and as a Systemic Trauma Specialist I say bollocks to that. You know why? Because I’m trauma-informed. We tell our stories in the hope of being heard. That people will both consider and validate our experiences, views or opinions and the truth is they don’t always. The internet is not a safe place. It’s not safe for women. Yet here we are asked to bare all in the hope of attracting, a following, a tribe, a crowd, a mob. All this when we actually have a word for trolling.

We have to be brave to tell our stories to be unheard, ignored, overlooked, criticised, mocked, ridiculed and even humiliated then carry on telling them anyway. You see we need to be partway to healed with a minuscule droplet of self-belief in order to survive the process. This is what it really means to be a Self Healer. It’s having to go against the mob when you are at your most vulnerable. You have to take on those arrows of misfortune and pull them out your back one by one. While everybody is shouting die.

Of course I believe in the best of humanity and that is because I have learned from the worst. I’ve learned from the property developers, the business leaders, the corporate managers, educators, and even the well-meaning exactly how cruel the world can be. People with power prescribe how they are going to help people, largely by deciding who is the most deserving, because they have the power to do so. Abuse of power is rife and most of us have given up our divine sovereignty for a monthly paycheck. We are employed doing things that go against our values or even common sense inflicting undue pain on our immediate and planetary communities.

This is what it really means to be a self healer it’s to pick up your pain and stop inflicting it on anybody else. It’s all about mitigating your trauma and recognising that trauma is largely systemic. When I fully understood this, that I couldn’t consume my way out of it, my only choice was to take what measures I could to detox from a toxic system. That I had to change everything that I believed conscious and subconscious. That I had to dig through all the ways that I had been programmed for somebody else’s benefit. That I had to claim my own humanity for my own sanity. That I had to be kind to myself, supportive of myself because love is the revolution.

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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.