Even last night as I lay in bed I was wondering why I had chosen to be Systemic Trauma Specialist, rather than a Systemic Change Specialist or indeed a Systemic Healing Specialist?
It’s a very long story that I will do my very best to summarise here. You see the systemic has only just teetered into my consciousness as something that fully exists much less that it can be effectively tackled. As if tackling is going to work. I can’t catch it wrestle it to the ground and make it submit. In fact, as my last post suggests that approach is probably quite counter-intuitive, no matter how powerful it might make me feel. You see I can imagine that there are a lot of beautiful corporate face out there in their mass-produced Chinese shirts grinning from ear to ear, with the prospect of selling us a brighter future, with clean energy and human-centred design. Problem is at what point did these Systemic Change Specialists learn to be human? Have they even had time in their life to deepen the context of their understanding of change.
You see for me change is a trauma response, maybe very specifically for me, yet it is. I grew up in a home where nothing ever changes, the toxic space tolerance was emotionally corrosive and then explosive as we all trauma bonded together under the coercive control of inherited unresolved abuse and war trauma. It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? For many of us, this is true and as we were bounced into adulthood with nothing more than the life jacket of freedom we felt forcibly propelled into survival mode. Few of us have sat down to reflect since unless of course you got your burn out badge. It’s been a very firmly held belief for a very long time; if I just was able to change things then everything will be ok. Change jobs, move house, move country, get a new car and I’ll feel better. Of course this approach became both consumptive and addictive one more pair of shoes to stem off your dissatisfaction with life. Then of course it turned to people what if I just help people realise their full potential and see the ways in which they might be able to contribute to society. Which at best was presumptive of me and at worst was mildly fascist. Why can’t we all just change the world and get along while screaming at one another? (Yes I was militant and quite scary with it too) You see the real breakthrough didn’t really come until I figured out that I needed to change myself. In fact, I needed to break to change as I had been so deeply coded with the unchecked toxicity of unconditional love that my own worthiness lurked like a fat island in an underground sewer. The truth is I still haven’t mastered radical self-care or even navigated it with the nuance of radical self-reliance (another trauma response). So you see if someone is running around telling you all the things that you need to change, thinking that there is a singular cure-all approach they probably haven’t talked to that many people, nor have the recognised that Systemic Change results from being entirely human. The bigger question here for me though, within that I’m not sure where shirts fit into that or why indeed they might be appropriate to the evolution of human society? Aesthetics communicate a number of things if you get good at reading the signs. Systemic Change has to emerge from disrupting the system that has been inherited.
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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I’ll admit it took awhile for the penny to drop on this one. A long drop with gentle thud at the end. Even my brilliant brain couldn’t piece together the obvious quickly right up until it did. Did I ever tell you that the Systemic Informs the personal and the personal Informs the Systemic. It seemed highly impersonal that Family Constellations are also know as Systemic Constellations and I didn’t fully recognise the connection until much later on. To this day I have never done a Corporate Systemic Constellation. I feel to do so might risk my own suicide. Somebody once asked me if I might consider doing corporate “Wellbeing Workshops”. To this day if I was ever to do such a thing I’d take the fee and then give everyone the afternoon off. Like fuck them, fuck corporate power. Fuck the System. LOL. I don’t get triggered much I promise.
Anyways so yes systemic constellations are a way to find out exactly how fucked up your world is. The way I do them is entirely centered around self. They’re more like an ‘Emotional Map’ than a standard constellation and god only knows how my work has morphed over COVID. I barely do floor maps anymore and it seems to deepen my clients experience in much the same way.
I’m a way ahead of myself here. I think this is supposed to be some kind of useful and directive explanation of a systemic constellation. Let me back track…
A Systemic Constellation is a process used to understand either family or system dynamic and how they impact on the individuals involved. The process was appropriated by Bert Hellinger from IsiZulu cultural healing practices. The process relies on people taking on the varying roles of a family system and playing them out as part of a catharsis healing that allows us to alter patterns and dynamics within the family system. It allows for the pre-verbal and unseen thinking of family members to be explored in non-threatening ways.
As I have said, the way I work with this process is largely through creating an emotional map of a client’s interior innerscape to unlock relational aspects of their emotional field. It’s really cool. I use bits of paper and it’s really easy. What is also really cool is that you get to see how you feel in a physical map that’s all laid out on the floor. You also tend to realise that you have complete control over your feelings and indeed what you feel and how you think. That you have the power to break the pattern and indeed the cycles within your own behaviour and the family system. That you can become and observer of your feeling that you don’t have to embody them. It’s a lot easier said than done though. It takes practice, before practice comes awareness and that is what Systemic Constellations are all about.
There are loads of different methods as to how to do a family constellation or indeed a systemic constellation is done. Emotional Mapping is the method that works best for me and my trauma-informed practice. What I love about Emotional Mapping most is that it is entirely fluid and allows you to express and feel fully. It also allows for a deep personalisation of the process especially when I work with creative practitioners and healers. (yes I work with healers) It’s really cool. What I often find by the end of an Emotional Map is that creative practitioners have created the basis for a body of work or even created a body of work. This is either through a collection of their words and/or a visualization of what has arisen while working with me.
Healers also get deepening insights into their own healing practices. As my sessions often form a fusion healing unique processes that may only occur through healing collaborations in a singular time in space of these sessions.
Guided entirely by intuition very little of what I do is replicable. Very little of what I do is replicable because it is centered around your own very unique experience of both trauma, healing and self-expression. Very recently I was described as a Master of Soul Retrieval and I have to say I loved that description of my work.
I have to admit that when I set out this heading I was more focused on a climate emergency, than a global pandemic or indeed the continuing questions of decolonisation that systemic trauma is always posing.
Yes WTF? I was taking a very privileged stance as they might say. My privilege affords me the right to take a ‘wider view’ to consider the big questions. Do you know why? Because I don’t live my life in abject terror on most days. Fight, flight does stuff to your brain. It’s called trauma.
Yet at the same time, I’m still interested in root cause, you see. The root cause is trauma and trauma in my experience is largely systemic. For me trauma is the question of our generation. That is why I’m always talking about it. It affects everything and my hashtags might teach you.
The earth is not the issue, a global pandemic is not the issue, nor is race. It’s the way that we relate to each other and the world at large that needs to change. It’s why I am interested in the oppressor. I’m interested in a deep examination of self. How to use that personal power to fall out of the system, redirect my attention and create the new.
Systemic oppression is complicated if you are witnessing it through the lens of trauma. We’ve been taught to believe that feelings don’t matter. That only objective facts matter. Except objective facts aren’t human or humane. This is an inherited tool of oppression. It’s been passed down through the generations. It’s one of many. If we don’t care how people feel we don’t care about people.
It’s for that reason that the killing of George Floyd is so powerful it’s an objective fact that he was murdered on film by an organisation that is intended to protect him. We can’t argue with it. It’s truth. Yet at the same time, we aren’t taking the same heed of what ‘isn’t’ happening in the UK, Israel, The Yemen, Brazil or even South Africa. Our social media is biased, or news platforms limited. We are all bound up in systems of oppression. We are all oppressed. That is what the powers that be don’t want you to know. It’s divide and rule all the way.
We need to come together to debase systemic abuse on all fronts, on all levels, in all nations. That until we take control of our own trauma it’s almost impossible to take care of the people we need to help most. I’m ready to be torn down in flames over this. Fuck like really. Decolonisation work is scary. The reason that it is scary is because there is so much trauma involved. You say the wrong thing you hit a nerve and a whole situation explodes. I’ve been there. I’ve been there plenty and still, I need to learn more so I have to ask more questions. Read more books and wonder what is actually going on. Really it’s trauma. The questions that we need to ask is how is our trauma preventing us from acting?
In recent months I have come to a conclusion, even though I’m writing now, even though I am centralising myself and even though I don’t understand everything and I will never get it all right. Oppressors need to be quiet. Unless of course, we are speaking to oppressors about oppression. We need to be able to hold space for the oppressed. We need to do some deep listening if anything is going to change.
The challenge that we face is that we seem to think that emotions aren’t’ real. That rage isn’t justified. Everybody’s rage is justified and it’s the result of not being heard. Black Lives Matter.
Running like fuck dropping the ball, falling flat on your face and then having a wee cry. That what my week has been like. How about yours? never mind feeling a little overconfident, to begin with. Humility, that where I need to begin. In other news the sun is shining in Scotland?
I wish I had better news for you. That you could heal your self and your trauma without feeling anything, It’s just not possible unless of course, you are talking about the physical pain and even that is a little tricky. I have believed that emotional healing is at the centre of all physical healing. That our bodies react and even responds to how we feel. That our bodies are constantly and continually responding to emotional information.
We need to pay attention to how we feel or can’t ignore it or it won’t be long until we are in the myre. Like seriously. I know that there is a lot of talk about plant medicines these days and alternative therapies. Really all they are is guiding you on a journey back to yourself to visit your core wounds see where the hurt lies and get you to sit with yourself for a minute. It’s a lot of what I do too. When all you have to do is sit down and talk to me. Imagine that. What you will discover is that you are actually making time to have a conversation with yourself. When was the last time you did that?
You don’t have to believe in some secret kind of woo that somebody just discovered from some archaic branch of ancient knowledge. All you have to do it sit down and speak. Speak the language of your soul and realise whatever has been vexing or stealing you out into the world. It’s wild huh? This is the world that I know. Holding space talking, tea, chat and conversation or in Scotland we call a wee blether. A wee blether and even a long blether offers us the opportunity to fix just about everything. To get it all out in the open in a safe space. Where it’s all about you. Where there is no reciprocity required and you can just be heard, find space to feel and even cry. Sometimes rage. I don’t mind the raging and in fact, it’s important that we are able to feel into those spaces of anguish and desire. That we don’t drink run or dance them away. That we own them and then realise we can bear them like new life that we can carry their weigh, love and care and find ourselves there. I know it all sounds very hippie and trite and maybe even a little bit shite, yet it is true. What more could we want from this world other than to be witnessed and heard and at the very least by ourselves? Have you learned to lick your wounds and love yourself in the dark spaces beyond what you have already known? Have you swam in the abyss? I know, I have lived there for years of my life. If I could find a comfy sofa I’d probably sit down. You see we enter the inner scape and make it real with our own metaphors. that is how we tell our stories, that is how we heal, for Churchill it was the black dog for me it’s the abyss and for others, it’s the dark side of the moon. It’s the pushing beyond and just like that… self-realisation happens.
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.
The secret flower language of tulips is perfect love. That’s pretty flawsome.
I’m not even sure that I believe in the idea of flaws anymore. They seem to have gone drastically out of vogue along with the world sin. Even though I might embrace the word flawsome as a philosophy what I need you to know it that there is everything right with you. The only thing that has lead you to believe otherwise is everybody else’s opinion of you. It’s sad but true. Go grab the tissues have a wee cry and come back to be.
Fuck living for other people. I know personally, it has been the bain of my life. All the ways I am supposed to be but aren’t. All the ways I am supposed to behave and don’t. I’m meant to speak quietly, brush my hair, never swear, probably wear less pyjamas and dedicate more time to my appearance. Now on that note, what I have to say maybe revolutionary. I’m one of those women who is generally very happy with her appearance, except when I bear more fat than is healthy. Yes, I get fat. It’s ok to say so. I also I get fat for a whole plethora of emotional and systemic reason that are far too complex and nuanced to go into in this blog post. It’s also ok to not like the things that you don’t like about yourself as long as they are deeply informed by your own feelings and not somebody else’s. You see flaws are superpowers. Maybe you speak loudly because you are supposed to be heard, maybe you swear because your frustration is supposed to be acknowledged and witnessed, maybe your hair should be messy because you’re disrupting the appearance of women. Maybe wearing pyjamas highlights how ridiculous it is that we expected to be uncomfortable in the world. That fashion isn’t designed for us. That we are expected to fit into a world not made for us. That is what flawsome is all about. We aren’t flawed, the world in its current format is. Because we, yes you an I are perfect. It’s the system that is fucked. It’s the system that rejects us our non-robotic selves, where we are conceived and engines of productivity and wealth generation for the elite. What if you lived in abundance. Would singing as you worked be a problem? Would your messy hair be disruptive? Of course not. That’s the thing the way you do or do not adapt into the system by the people, organisation and institutions that surround you have everything to do with them and nothing to do with you. Your adaptation is to do with how other people need you to be in order for them to feel well, whole and successful. Any form of judgement is a trauma response that values control and dominance of the sacredness of human life over the innate non-linear gifts that we have to share with the world.
This has been my tag line for a while. I’ve played around with a few. Yet largely this one has stuck and there are multiple reasons as to why. Time is such a loaded word as it seems to be the core building block of our human reality for the most part. The Great Pause appears to be altering our interaction with time. This is as we realise that we can have a fare more expansive real-life existence if we are willing to utilise time to explore our inner scapes. Our inner scapes that are constructed from stories of our past present and future.
When I settled on Time For Change it acted for me as a call to action for impending sociological and ecological crisis. Secondly, it references my own practice where I mainly provide 3-hour sessions. You seem time can expand and shrink depending on the attention we give it much like consciousness. We all know this. An afternoon can feel a fifteen-minute interlude and a road trip across a vast desert can feel like an eternity. That our experience of time can make up as much of our reality as the sights, sounds and sensations that surround us. Yet we dismiss this knowledge as a fleeting perplexion, an inconvenient stain on the solidity of what we think we know.
You see it’s almost impossible to make change unless we make time for it. It’s so obvious and yet so lost to us. In fact, it’s at the very core of what I do. Slow down, feel connect breath, explore. Many of us out there in the wellness business hark on about meditation, mindfulness and even presence yet there are few of us fully engaging in that process. We use business to prop up our own self-care regimes as it’s the only way to make us fully accountable. That is why to me staring at the ceiling is so important. You see it isn’t about having a set practise or following a guru or even adopting a whole new way of being. It’s as simple as taking time for ourselves. Taking time to reprogramme. So many of us a careering along we have no idea what programme we are even running on. That is why I rarely define myself as a coach. We are so much more than our productivity or outward visual success. We are magical beings that have the ability to navigate, transmute and transform multiple paradigms.
Maybe that all sounds fantastical and maybe it is? Then if you think about it slightly deeper it’s absolutely true. As humans, we have wandered through time. We have known different eras and technologies. We have even managed to create objects that survive us, while we disappear. We have literally lived in different paradigms and it is the unrelenting knowledge of a future that commits us to the actions or belief structures that drives us each day. Whether you are working in full awareness of that or not it is undoubtedly true. Most of us are blithely unaware of what drives us forward for many it is simply the acquisition of material wealth and the consumption of experiences. For me it’s something else it’s creating tangible magic through the use of time and conversation. You see when we slow things down it is possible to time travel. It is possible to dive into somebody else word and learn what it is to arrive in another country, another time, another language, another paradigm. We can be transported to whole new realms we could never imagine on our own. We also have the ability to create our own lives and worlds the way we might like it. By understanding the past we can expand in our visions of the future. I like to think of it as future healing. Imagine if every action you take had the ability to transform everything around you. Imagine, just imagine? Even that takes time.
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.
Working from bed sees both liberating and entrapment.
What the fuck is that? It’s can only be best described as a nuanced version of self-care. Something beyond #nurturance and slightly less demanding than radical self-love. Yeah I know us radical disrupters are on it. Some of us are doing our best to not capitalise on your and indeed our misfortunes. The world’s is fuck. We have a global movement rebelling against our own extinction that makes Greenpeace look incredibly PC. This is what it has come to the 6th Mass Extinction and yes we are here. I’m not denying it. In fact the creation The Life Doula centres at the very heart of Eco-Anxiety, as it has now been coined. I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life staring at the ceiling not just thinking what am I going to do with my life? but How the fuck do we fix this shit show? As well as trying to figure out what my specific role in this particular clusterburach might be?
I’ve dreamed up and imagined it all from free driving lessons for high school students (So mid-nineties I know) to the idea of planting a billion trees. My deepest regret may well be what I could have been doing it in the meantime.
Yet as I look back over thing the power of observation and my relentless quest for knowledge seems to be finally paying off.
Yet I’ve been watching closely and experiencing deeply the human process. As a species, we often seem to come up with grand solutions – like flavour of the time veganism. For multiple reason veganism (could be) deeply beneficial. Yet, on the other hand, what are huge swathes of mono-cultures doing for biodiversity and indeed food miles really doing for the planet and it’s people? I come from Scotland and if we know that locally sourced food is often the best choice I wonder how fond I truly am of turnip. I know it’s not as simple as that. I have absolutely no doubt that there is a militant Scottish Vegan out there living their best life on only locally sourced food, hand foraged from within a 4-mile radius (please contact me I’d love to speak to you).
My main source of interest, however, has been human life at its very essence. Who we are, what we do, what we believe, how we live and a result. Family dynamics, family systems and community dynamics and how this all interplays with land ownership, development and the institutions and corporations that we interact with to control manage and even coordinate these things. Even all those well-meaning grassroots organisations started by hippies. Most things in our world are spectacularly out of balance (I’m a Libra I should definitely know) That even the best-intentioned of us make long term decision that are detrimental for the collective in favour of our own personal gain and even survival (things like getting in your car). Where doing the right thing is at a small very irrational war with our personal ego and even trauma.
I wrote most of this little over 3 weeks ago and how times have literally changed…the journey inward is finally in vogue along with our very clear and apparently systemic trauma (would anybody like to go back to working in an office?).
So I’ve thought about activism a lot and I’m confident in my decision. For me it’s all about personal activism. Which in all honesty can look like a lot of things? Largely though it’s taking the decision to no longer engage in The Toxic System,. Yes, it’s difficult, complicated and even messy but guess what that is exactly where we have ended up here in The Great Pause. In, fact I’m not asking you to do anything. In fact, doing nothing might be the best thing you can do as The Nap Ministry so beautifully demonstrate.
Even before The Great Pause, this whole article was written in deep praise and awe of all the anxious and depressed bedridden people out there, who have been forced to live lives of isolation. In some way, it is farse turned tragedy that all of a sudden the economically unproductive have become to focus on our collective care, now that we have time on our hands. For want of a better term, the decolonising of time has been at the core of my work for years. Yes, it’s complex, messy and difficult. Yet unless we value time and the power that it gives us to connect and all the riches it holds here in this 3D reality what do any of us really know about life anyway?
