Tag: Systemic Healing

Uncategorized

Visa Anxiety

kimberleen

Honestly, there are a million and one things to be fucked up about and I really think that we need to be far more accepting of this. More than this I wish people would fuck off with their breathing exercises from time to time. Sometimes we really do have a million and one reasons why we feel stuck or brain dead and out of it or my personal favourite brain fog. If there is anything that the last few years has taught me is that my mind is in full working order. All that overthinking must demonstrate something. Except of course the mind, the brain and the body hold some very different properties. In Today one of my more recent blog posts I talked about being a COVID refugee. I literally ended up hanging out in Namibia for nine months. In case you didn’t know already nine months is three months short of a year. It’s really long time to end up somewhere that you didn’t expect, writing a master’s, watching the death toll rise and trying not to figure out what to do next; other than stay sane. It’s a funny thing all those insidious thoughts that turn into a backdrop of feeling. It’s quite a thing really the backdrop of feeling that makes up our emotional landscapes and how sometimes they seem to entrap us. When really it’s just a pushed down unspoken about thoughts that seem to be controlling our world. Needless to say, I’ve added COVID Refugee to the list of books that I need to write.

It was an intense yet homely time in the desert. That played out like a beautiful groundhog day tapestry that you really had to live through. You see life in many ways could not have been more simple, more straightforward or even better catered for, it’s just that for obvious reasons I was stressed under pressure and to my realisation now, quite freaked out. It turns out much to my surprise that certainty offers quite a remarkable toolset for wellbeing. One that I wasn’t sure that I needed until now. It will come as no surprise to many of you that I live with quite high levels of uncertainty and have done for years. At least now my work is legally allowed. You think I’m kidding when I say that. What if I told you I am not. What if you have been working covertly for years? Few people get to truly understand what it is to be an immigrant and even worse a refugee. Someone with no connections and nowhere else to be. And what do we do we put out big girl panties on and do our best to full adult. It’s nothing less than terrifying to live such precarious situations where just one thing has to go wrong and your whole way of life is under threat. More than this that your life is under threat.

We live in interesting times. A pandemic, The fall of occupied Afghanistan and now this whole thing with Russia. Borders are very important things for reasons that few people want to talk about. Borders are about control and thus adversely about certainty. You see I see the world differently. I see the world through the lens of trauma. There were no fences in Southern Africa before Jan Van Riebeek arrived. That’s what the oral history says. Yet modern humans spend their time policing and creating borders, boundary lines and systems of control. Systems of control that have nothing to do with nature. Systems that are alien. I wonder sometimes what have we learned? What is the climate emergency here to teach us? As I watched South African sand become Nambian sand through a wire border fence. Who gets to decide who it belongs to or indeed why it has to belong to anybody at all? It gets me to thinking about territories. How far we can walk? How far do we need to travel in order to survive? It feels like we should be thinking about land very differently. I’m feeling about land very differently and why we need those one hundred and ninety-five stamps in our passport. What is that separates us other than an arbitrary colonialist line drawn straight across the desert?

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

Uncategorized

Just Start

kimberleen

It feels good to be here again. Writing. Writing what I want. Finding my way back to the blank screen only to find that it brings a refreshing calmness and healthy jolt that I have been away for a long time. WordPress has changed its layout again and I’m worried what challenges that might bring me in putting this article together. I really do wish I could have gotten to you sooner. It feels like a revisitation. However, I have been stuck. Stuck in an internal maelstrom for quite a while which has only just realised me to some slightly more gentle water rapids. The long and short answer is that I have been waiting on a visa as well as waiting on the opportunity to move. Even though I have been applying for visas in what is now close to a decade there are few that can describe the chronic anxiety of the state, that I have yet to master. So there it is my anxiety got the better of me and hopefully, that lets you off the hook too.

So I am here back in Mkhanda here to complete what I didn’t finish the first time around. I think really what has really spinning me out is how complex my life is as well as the work that I do. I wonder what you must all think as look at me going through this process which is my life that is all about trauma, when I can’t tell you exactly what I am working with because it is bound by confidentiality. Maybe at this point, I should probably be referring you to my other website which is also deeply neglected. Make you wonder why I have them at all if I am just going to ignore them. It makes me feel like an errand mother. However, that’s life sometimes we have to juggle. Something that seems negligible one week is critical the next as we attempt not to rock the boat from running from one task to another. That’s where my life has been at and although I have been very well looked after over the last several months, sometimes we just have to accept the innings we have and play from there.

Part of me wants to make promises or tell you what I will do next or even more about where I am in terms of work and who I am working with. the things is that belongs on the other website and maybe that just tells me where my next piece of writing should lead me.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

Uncategorized

Today

kimberleen

Just for today, it feels like a powerful moment to interrupt the months-long silence for those of you that had been following or at the very least keeping an eye on this blog. To say hello! Do you remember me I exist and yes I am still out here working on the things that I had been consistently writing about in this blog? To be honest I am largely just a little disappointed that I was not able to keep up with the thing that I had to write and the format by which I had planned for this year to keep writing them. More than that that I dropped out of any kind of posting at all. I had managed to maintain quite a stint to be fair. Right now I am in Windhoek, Namibia, an exotic location I know. The reasons and answers of how did I get here are far too long, winding and existential than I will ever be able to explain here. What I can say is that for right now I am COVID refugee where I was once a love migrant and things are a lot better than they might read. I am very happy to be where I am. I am safe and I also feel safe. Which if you’ve been following my streams of thought for any length of time you will know is of the utmost importance to me as it should be. I have been here in, Namibia since the 18th of May 2021 will be here I imagine for several more weeks to come, which I am also happy about. The reason why I am telling you this is this means I will finally have time to catch up on content I needed and wanted to produce for this website and all you healing humans out there. However, there is no way around it, though I may be trauma-informed the contents of my head and the strategy for creating content here is currently far from organised in what I can only describe as a backwards-facing action plan.

I started today by using debt management as an analogy for how I feel about my life, my to-do list and cleaning up my mess. That you should pay off all the smallest debts first and dedicate the excess money it frees up towards the bigger debts. Even with this approach to tackling the to-do list it still feels overwhelming as I can’t figure out exactly where is the best place to focus my energy. Though I am very aware that I have significant debt (if not the biggest debt and thus deficit of attention owed) here. This is, to say the least anxiety-inducing as this work and you are both crucial to my path forward and the development of this work. So what the hell happened?

What I can tell you is that a Master of Research in Human Geography; Spaces, Politics & Ecologies has been struck off the list officially today. So I can now put some fancy letters behind my name. I’m now Kimberley K Stone BA Hons MRes. Pah! Just like that, I did it. I achieved a dream. The inconsistency here is the price I had to pay for it and I apologise for that. I do hope to do much better in the future and in fact, I am going to have to.

I always like to remind my readers that I too am traumatised and hope that it offers you some semblance of sanity, in this truly chaotic world. That we are all deeply flawed and what can be impossible to express is at these times totally understandable. ‘Netflix and chill’ has become shorthand for “I just can’t”. At least the entertainment seems to be of slightly better quality than other dystopian carnations. Where exactly do we go to escape from escapism? So yes they say consistency is key to anything and mostly everything that you want to be good at. That turning up is enough. So here I am turning up again. I’m sad I was away from home for so long but I’m here now I’m back and I’m always doing my best to show up, sometimes though, that isn’t always possible. Please forgive me

Yes, life after trauma can feel like time travel as we literally just try and get our shit together, whether that is mentally, emotionally or physically, never mind organised. When a trauma bomb has arrived it can feel like our whole bodies are wading through electric treacle that overstimulates, overwhelms and can leave us numb. It’s hard to find ourselves. Hard to feel ourselves. Hard to hear ourselves. And most often hardest to embody everything that we truly feel and would rather have or be instead. So I’m back to one day at a time while stuck in seventh gear.

Uncategorized

Decolonize Your Thinking

kimberleen

Yes this is a thing. Yes if you bring it up in random converstation you are destined to find that this might be a activating thought, of course this depends what demographic you are talkign to. After all how are we supposed to get rid of all those colonial and imperialist statues without creating a revisionist history? As it is often touted ‘history is written by the victors’. I wonder what that says about the relics of ancient Egypt? As of yet ancient Egypt’s epitaph to pagan living has yet to be entirely derided as savage. In fact quite the opposite. We continually look to ancient egyption society for the keys and secrets of modern day life, in the hope that it offers a more advanced understanding to life, the universe and everything than our current defunct human existance. As well as the Egyption artificats continued to prized and revered even though we might consider the ancient culture for which they sprout to be both archaic or offensive to our modern day sensibilites.

I suppose that casting our eyes to ancient egypt does give us the perfect opportunity to consider what is meant by decolonisation. Understanding decolonistaion also invites us to take a wider lens on human thinking and understanding. We didn’t always believe what we do now. Nor did we always think the way that we do. In fact much of the way in which we think can easily be understood as modernity. That human society and culture should alwaye progress towards a utopian dream scape of human living. Of course living here in the early 2020’s we can easily say that the dystopian present is quickly catching up with us. Beyond Bladerunner life on planet Earth is probably worse than we could have imagined existing in a pandemic and the center of a climate ermgency that the masses fail to be waking up to. We are still driving cars for fuck sake. Yet here we are scoffing at the concept of decolonisation. That maybe the people that came before us have a better understanding of how to maintain the balance of life than we do.

I always found it fascinating when I used to look at documentation of life in Africa how simple life was and how beautiful it seemed to live in balance with nature. These dasy I understand that as not much more than a pastoral idyl that denies the ‘developing’ world the self-detemination of the eurocentric model that was built through exploitation. At the same time I also recognis that eurocentric models have got a lot wrong. This is mainly beacuse they have built there world view on strange things like logic and reason while complete undermining the interconnectedness of everything.

A butterfly flaps it’s wings and somewhere in the word a monsoon starts. This was once called chaos theory. I now have to sit and wonder what is so chaotic about it? It makes perfect sense to me especilly when we are playing the game of consequences. Everything has both an equal and opposit balancing action in science. Yet her we are wondering why consumption is killing us, and yet we still do it?

Of course if you have be following me for any length of time you will know by now that I premise that the underlying cause of most human behaviour in this time is an embodiment of systemic trauma. That as humans we are being called to review who we are, where we come from to indentify the traumagenic points in our lives. These are the points in our lives that are generating trauma, not just for us, for our families , communites and future generations. It makes sense then to examin the roles of our ancestors. The good ones , the bad ones or lets keep it basic the known ones. Then oh what a surprise it must be to discover that African spirituality has ancestral reverence as it’s focal point. How much more surprising who it be to find that these are the references that a littered through our bible, even within the new testiment. As I get older I wonder how much more anceint human wisdom is hidden in plain sight. How much more of this wisdom has been corrupted in order to center the Eurocentric take. How much longer are we meant to sit here and believe the illusions of modernity, progress and exponential growth on a planet with finite resources. These days playing stupid equates to playing dead.

So decolonising your thinking become more about creating a reasonable critic that moves us away from the psychopathic and sociapthic thinking of both the imperialist and the colonialist. Where may be just maybe we begin to value the wider human narrative more than that of the ruling classes. After all why do we need rulers? When nobody else seems quite so commited to breaking all the rules? Why do we seek to maintain the current structures of power when they do not serve us.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude.

If you enjoyed reading this article I would be delighted if you can buy me a ko-fi here.

Uncategorized

The Emotional Journey

kimberleen

Victimhood exploded into my consciousness today as I wondered what that really meant for so many of us. Victimhood has become a dirty word. So much of what we are told to be outraged about is in fact inconvenient, uncomfortable and honestly best left under the carpet for most people. We just don’t talk about it. About our weaknesses about our fears. Nor do we take the real-time to identify their origins. It’s an ever-ongoing journey the journey back to ourselves. Most of our journeys start with trauma, whether it’s garden variety childhood trauma or something a little more dramatic. Trauma lies at the root of our emotional journey. Of course, not everyone might believe that, for me it’s certainly a larger part of my truth. Once we get to a certain point in our own lives we really have no other option than to take responsibility for our journey. We have to take responsibility for our choices and we have to stand in our own sovereignty when reaping the consequences of those actions. So many of us walk the tightrope of boundaries trying to figure out what is just the right amount of give and take. For me personally, I always lookout for the best in people and now as I get older I have truly given deep thought to what is the most compassionate thing I can do for me. That seeing the best in people and wanting what’s best for them is not necessarily what is best for me. That in a world where you could be anything being kind isn’t always helpful. I’ve been mulling all of this over for months now. All the flawed belief systems that I have been running my life on. Unconditional love, sacrificial love, guilt, kindness, compassion and trust (I was raised a Catholic after all). Of course they are great values to have however what I have learned is that I have to put myself at the center of that circle. Even more recently what I have learned is that in my early twenties I was actually doing a lot better than I thought. More than this, the world is a lot more fucked than I thought and even more interestingly the people that are trying to save ‘the world’ are the most fucked of us all. Like seriously I’ve figured out a lot and although in my fortieth year I think I might have bordered on becoming a bit more conservative I fully appreciate that now more than ever I’m more radical than I ever thought. More than this I am frustrated, bored and quite frankly over it. Over what has been dished out and served up like dog vomit for us all to willfully eat. The terrible thing is that nobody actually knows any better. Like seriously unless you are invested in deep listening. You are not even close to discovering or unleashing the answers to the world’s problems. The world is at a loss.

Wow. It really is emotional. What else did you expect when you were catapulted into a human life that is bookended by birth and death? Yes, the emotional journey is about everything in the middle from dropping your first ice-cream to signing off on your will. It’s intense in here, this human life.

It’s certainly not what we are sold from the family films to the bible or even something a little edgier. It is really clear that most of the narratives are false. Well at least from my perspective? Or are they? You see I’ve been sitting at the centre of the emotional journey for a while now. I’ve been alive for a while now and like most of you I didn’t start out with anybody talking to me about how I feel. How I should feel or indeed if any of my feelings were ok? From joy to dismay most of my feelings by most of the people I have met on this journey through life have been dismissed, overlooked, ridiculed, mocked, weaponised and ignored. As a result, I have suppressed, repressed and ignored my feels and along with it any sense fo self. To be clear I here I am only talking about my feelings here. I amn’t even delving into the more resonable realm of thought. When it comes to human conversation orginal thought can be treacherous if you dare to have and imagination.

You see there’s a lot of talk about the heroes journey about the predictive steps that you might take to self-redemption. The real kicker is that you have to lose everything to gain something and go to where the fear is. I know it sounds straight forward. However it really isn’t the case. Especially when we are hiding from our own fear. Have you ever hidden from you own fear? To be honest the best label that I have for that is anxiety. The truth is it is super difficult to step into your own power especially when everyone is telling you not to. You might find it super confusing to discover that many people don’t want that for you, especially when you are living a life with deep authenticity. You see it highlights all the things that other people are not and they don’t like that. It’s actually quite a mission to turn off the exterior chatter that dictates your process in your head. More than this detach from it completely. There are so many people who are willing to hold you back from your dreams, question your curiosity and even undermine your moral commitment.

In a world where many of us are engaged with the world through the filter of screens controlled by an algorithm, now more than ever it entirely possible to control what you witness. Scary on one side of things and an incredible opportunity on the other. Of course, I am not a sunshine and roses kind of girl. I am ultimately someone deeply aware of the thorns. Although we do have to face our fears we don’t have to stay witness to human tragedy and especially not our own.

It’s a problem. It’s a problem that our feelings aren’t considered valid. The real challenge that I present in this article is how do we present emotions as both necessary and valid? How do we get on the emotional journey? More than this how do we get anybody to share the emotional ride. I suppose at this point we might want to ask is what is the first emotion that we felt can we remeber? Do we know how we felt as a child? Do we know how we feel. For many of us this is the revelation that takes us onto the emotional journey as an adult. It’s recognising the way we feel now is often related to how we felt in the past. That often our emotional journeys as adults is the recovery of the emotional journey of our pasts. That understanding the emotional journey of the past is absolutely key to unlocking the emotional journey that we desire in the future. Often the emotional journey doesn’s always start well. It’s sometimes all about all the feelings that we don’t want, that we are emmersed in, that we can’t seem to get out of. It’s the point at which that we can no longer stand the ‘negative’ emotions that we feel that creates a trajectory of radical change.

Of course it isn’t easy stepping out on to the open road with all you vulnerabilty on view after all isn’t that what unifoms were for? If we all dress the same, act the same, speak the same, think the same , then how could anythign possibly go wrong? You are not the control sample of the universe. We are not the play thing of corporations and institutions. We have feelings, we have emotions and we are entited to have our thoughts, feeling and emotions respected. It’s a no brainer. Literally stop thinking about it and start doing the work.

More than this the emotional journey is not linear. Somehow in this wack world we are all told that we have to continually prove ourselves. To be honest I wonder sometimes what it would be like to coast for a while. Yet somehow that doesn’t seem to be allowed. We have to keep pushing for ever greater success and ever greater emotional upgrade. What if you just put either one of those two things down for a second. In recent years it’s become ever more clear that the work never ends. That our evolving emotional landscape is the journey. That we as individuals are there for all our emotional ups and down and unexpectd sideswerves. I feel like I am, of course, pointing out the obvious. Yet truly in a world where the term ‘Mental Health Crisis’ is banded about like a ping pong ball we have to start connecting the dots. As a species we are not well. As a species our mental and emotional health are impacting our lives, familes and communities. Our mental health is impacting the planet. What are the deep seated emotions that are stopping you from doing the right thing? What is stopping you from addressing this ‘Mental Health Crisis’? Where and how is poor mental health affecting you? Is this the intersection at which to start the conscious emotional journey.

This article was written by a dyslexic with a punk attitude to accompany the Feral Systemic Healing Circle

Uncategorized

Trauma Bomb

kimberleen

Well I’m sure somewhere in my badly executed media strategy I had a concept of all the issues that might revolve around the idea of Feral. My new Systemic Healing Circle for anybody that actually gives a shit about current world affairs. Where I was going to outline very intelligently all the ways in which the Feral concept came into being. About wildness, re-wilding, where in the meantime some of us (aka me) never managed to get fully sytemised in the first place. Like a feral cat that didn’t get exactly what they wanted out of system, that was supposedly designed to support them I was all and am still all too ready to tear the dysfunctional system apart if it didn’t serve me perfectly.

First of all this kind of approach and attitude to the system is highly indicative of personal trauma and second of all why the fuck is everyone else so compliant? There are more questions too that include: Is it just me? Why can’t you just get along? Accompanied by deeper musings… if the system doesn’t serve everybody does it serve anybody? You see that is the challenge with systems (speaking as somebody that just spent a week of her life scheduling emails for the year) they don’t work for everybody. As human components of the system when we meet people that don’t fit into our agenda, the trajectory of an organisation or the guiding principles of society we tend to ignore, overlook, dimiss, silence, reject, remove, exile and even kill the people that don’t agree. Fucking scary right? Why do we do that? Because its uncomfortable, inconvenient, disruptive, time consuming, difficult and ultimately embarassing to admit that we don’t have all the answers, nor are we capable of delivering all the solutions. That the rules, the law and ‘our’ procedures don’t work for everybody. That actually the system denies our humanity by denying many of the humans that belong to it. And you know what? We do this mainly all in the name of progress.

As I am sure that I have written this multiple times the micro informs the macro. The challenges that we have globally are relational. That the system rejects the interpersonal as significant and engrains, neglect, abuse and trauma into systemic relations. This is why I often tend to talk about the anti-human system. There is so much programming that fuels these kind of behaviours it’s hard to accept that for the most part we are contributing to the toxic systems that keep people at best stuck and at worst traumatised. The real trick is figuring out where we are perpetuting harm in a toxic system. And more than this where we are silently complicit. This week (tonight in fact) I start the Feral Systemic Healing Circle, which morphed and developed from a few approches that included the idea of a group called Complicit Anonoymous (that never got off the ground). The premis of Complicit Anonymous was that most of us with any ____________ (insert applicable word here) know that we cause harm and are contributing to societal collapse, the 6th mass extinction and climate change. Most of us are all operating in systems that largely refuse to ancknowldege the ways in which they cause harm. From the single mother that won’t receive a wellfare check to the petrochemical dependency of most companies and yet we choose to carry on buisness as usual. Where there are so many things to stand up for so many injustices to fight against it’s fucking exhasuting. Yet we carry these burdens as we too remain trapped in the cycle of perpetuating economic growth and maintain economic power by controlling resources, such as land access. Yet at the same time impacting basic resources such as air. The consumptive behaviour of the money classes and developed countries are having dire consequencies of the air quality of the systemically abused and ‘developing’ economies. Yet we carry on. Of course I am as guit as the next person. The challege is that all these behaviour are interconnected and intersectional as we try to build a way out of the Systemic Trauma Bomb that we have created.

Why is this artilce called Trauma Bomb I often write about how the personal informs the planetary. Last week I witnessed and experieinced what I can only be describe as a trauma bomb. It’s where two or more emotional triggers and thus unresolved trauma meets and blows up. It was an interpersonal relational masterpiece of destruction that threw most of if not all of my work schedule totally of schedule. It would have been great to ignore it. It would have been great to deny that my unrecognised trauma, the previously unseen shadow had anything to do with it, ignore the other persons issue and of course bythly carry on. That wasn’t possible. No matter how bad the circumstances. How dire the consequences of an emotional outburst, explosion or trauma bomb is we have to take the time to work with the trauma, acknowledge the pain and find new strategies. Nobody, not even a trauma doula is going to get it right all of the time, especially when we are working with our shadows, the things that we can’t see. You see shadow work gets complicated when we start to understand collective shadow work or even just the shadow of the companies organisations we work for or even run. You see what are the trauma bombs of thes organisations, companies and structures when their shadows meet. I think we are seeing these play out perfectly in the USA right now. Where corporate media fails to take repsonsibily for promoting and endorising very traumatised man and encouraging all his traumatised followers while denying the legitmacy of Black Lives Matter. Racism is systemic trauma. Yet the USA seems to be living a polarity of full scale systemic trauma denial that is engrained into most of it’s insitutions. Why won’t Mike Pence get rid of Trump?

That’s why my spelling is wobbly, I’m not trying to hide that I am dyslexic. I’m actively exposing my shadow. Why do I say I’m traumatised frequently? So it liberates you to say it too. Trauma is the real pandemic. In a society built on privilige, competion and capitalism Letting everyone know where all the gremlins are puts me at a major disadvantage. I’m absolutely fucking certain that numerous people have judged me for the quality of my output. Indeed totally bypassed it. I thank you. Language and presentation even though I have forgetten to mention it numerable times in my writing is a key componant of Systemic Trauma. Saying you could do better? If you just paid a bit more attention to your work? or the killer “Can you speak english please?” The answer to that question is no I can’t. Are you listening properly? Are you paying attention? Can you see where your biases, your prejudice and your biggotory yet? If I waited until I met your standards I would never have gotten started and indeed the terror of being judged for my seeming laziness or lack of attention has prevented me from flourishing far sooner in life. So yes here we are all complit in a toxic system, looking for a way out we can’t buy. If you are looking for solutions it’s time to sign-up to Feral Systemic Healing Circle.

This articel is the first in a year long series acompanying Feral Systemic Healing Circle

Uncategorized

Feral

kimberleen

I’m fairly confident that I have not written about this before. I’ve got no idea why, given that its’ been burning though my brain as an idea ever since forever ago. Like alot of the ideas I have. Anyways I’m really excited about this one. Let me say this very clearly, I am feral. I don’t belong in the system and my natural environment has been destroyed and well it’s left me somewaht untameable. That might be how you youd describe me if I was an animal, and then of course I am. Human’s are animals, we certainly seem to follow our worst impulses a lot of the time (that will be the trauma). And yes most of live very far outside the confines of our natural envirnoment, most of us don’t even have access to a natural water source these days, especially if we live in cities. We are forced to drink chlorine for our own good.

You see I got a bit pissed of with all these re-wilding wild women posts, projects and groups that seemed to need a matching head dress to go with you mass produced slave labour arm bands in order to feel free. What true wild human have you met that has a warddrobe of accesories that are weather essentials? Anyways I should probably stay quiet here. My bad attitude hardwire is being to shine through after a rather intesne week. That’s my problem that is why I might describe my self as feral. I don’t fit into the system, in fact it terrifies me that so many people do. I’m literally lost as to how people keep together such a distinct and fuck-up socital lie. Except of course for paychecks. That’s how. Would anybody like to talk abour corruption? We are courrupt. Remember you can’t eat money? Universal enslavement has been a thing for a while now. As I’m sure any Marx theorist will tell you. So yeah I called bullshit on the system a long time ago. I didnt’ like it going in and I’ve broken the heels of all the pretty shoes I have doing the best I can to stay out. In fact I’ve nearly destroyed myself to be non-complict in the system’s anti-human ways. So yes fuck the system. Fuck the system hard.

It’s not very productive though is it? So I’ll internalise capitalism and keep on writing. So if you are disruptor an interested in Personal Activism and Systemic Healing you can sign up to join the Feral Systemic Healing Circle which convenes on or around every new moon of 2021.

If you have enjoyed reading this article you can donate here or check out my shop for services.

Uncategorized

Systemic Healing

kimberleen

It’s such a big quest and question…are you ready to take on the system. I’m fucking not. I put in toes and I somehow seem to lose a limb and snap some very weak heart strings. I’m not sure my nerves can take it anymore, in fact, I know that can’t, it isn’t for a lack of courage. It seems these days due to growing wisdom several weeks ago I wrote about the ideas of sacred schism and even splits. In fact, I’ve been seeding this consciousness into a new understanding of progress that dances between values and purpose and how they can be navigated in more personal ways. Of course, lets be clear I can get as trigger happy as the next person. I am happy to take an ejector seat out of any situation that no longer serves me. You see what does splitting and schisming really create if not allowed for? I often wonder what the world were to look like if we simply viewed it as a massive playground. I don’t like it over here. I think I’ll go over there. Sometimes you end up doing this you really hate with people your really love and sometimes you end up doing things you really love with people you really hate. You see for me so far, life has been a navigation of these two polarities. I’m sure navigating these polarities may even be partway of the source to systemic healing. What if you could find the middle road? Indeed at 39, I believe that it might actually be possible. You see we aren’t supposed to be alone, we are supposed to be in community to operate from within the centre of supportive systems that are both regenerative and sustainable. This may be where the word holistic has been sprouting with and growing everywhere like a Waldorf School garden.

In fact, in recent months and especially since COVId 19 my co-collaborators are taking a very interesting turn. These days I have found myself working with Multi-Dimensional Therapists, Alchemists and even Sangoma’s as my human life becomes ever more expanded in consciousness. It feels to me that I have finally left The Matrix as I officially got accepted into Hogwarts in September (I’m not kidding).

For me, it seems that ultimately Systemic Healing can only occur by leaving the sytem or in fact any system that puts the objective of the organisation over and above that of it’s members. That we have to go solo hang tough and wait for our tribe to find us right on the edge of what might be possible. No one can do exactly what you are doing or be exactly as you are and we all have a unique calling and divine path to walk on our ways back to ourselves. Speaking our truth and living it as best you can is only the way to move forward with integrity in order to live as an authentic self. It’s ok that is exactly where all the ‘others’ find you. I can’t imagine it is easy being a Multi-Dimensional Therapist, Alchemist or even the more traditional Sangoma. This morning alone I wondered if Cast Out might be yet another book title for me to explore if I ever find a place to settle long enough to write it.

What I can tell you for sure is that no one living within the system told the ‘others’ how to become. The had to lose themselves to find themselves. As the seed cracks open in search of the sun.

If you have enjoyed this article you can donate here https://ko-fi.com/thelifedoula

Uncategorized

Systemic Trauma Revisited

kimberleen

It really is the motherload of understanding all the ways in which we are gaslit into believing that our society is relatively functional as we hurtle towards human extinction. Systemic Trauma bounced into my consciousness a little over a year ago. Now I finally understand who I am and what I do.  Although systemic trauma it might be a toxic heap of shit it is actually relatively easy to unravel if we work on it from the perspective of the personal.

I’m sure you don’t believe me. Yet at the same time what much else do we have to work with? Right now this article feels like it’s going to draw on the much deeper understanding of Systemic Healing. Rather than the actual trauma that I seem to have been covered quite extensively. The key message is; the anti-human system that expects you to work until you die while living in an ever-increasing toxic environment, as a result of the willful neglect of our environment and us people by both government and business. It’s not rocket science, as post-truth gaslighting carves the way for an emerging new consciousness.

You see we have to be able to work collectively in order to be able to survive. We have to be able to survive locally in order for life to be sustainable. We need to be able to live in balance with our immediate surroundings in order to collective action to work effectively and limit detrimental impacts further afield.

It’s quite straight forward and I think most of us that are on any form of quest to “Save Ourselves” has probably noted most of these key components while booking flights abroad and eating a lot of chickpeas (I’m still waiting for the bio impact of chickpeas consumption to emerge and eagerly awaiting the news of the human catastrophe it has caused). You see it’s all well and good to be an activist or even trauma-informed. It’s another thing to constantly and continually have to consider the repercussions of our actions. I wonder if more of us were able to do this with a deep commitment to the personal,  how our world might radically alter. Even for me as a “Systemic Trauma Specialist” I have to tell you my trauma management is a full-time job. With an ever-deeper exploration of what I need to both learn to allow and contain. Where my flow between rigid boundaries and clear consent and allowing can be refined for everybody’s benefit. The last few months have been a deep act of aligning as well as witnessing the way in which I betray myself and in the process let other people defile me and my work as I allow them to bleed their trauma into my life. You see we have a sacred responsibility to the communities in which we live to the do the work of healing ourselves. That by picking up carrying and caring for our own burdens we give other people ways to do the same with their own. Healing hurts and we cannot heal all at once. Though we can take a very good crack at it from time to time miracle do and can happen. The thing is identifying the things that cause you pain, the things that trigger and traumatise you. We need to move away from them at speed the moment that the overspill becomes real. There is no need to intoxicate others with things that cannot be contained. Yet at the same time we either all go together or none of us does. Somewhere in this strange life, we have free choice and free will. However, in my experience how much of it is dictated to by laziness or worse resignation? It’s always been that way and I can’t be bothered. That’s fine? Then why should I be bothered with you?

If you have enjoyed this article you can donate here https://ko-fi.com/thelifedoula

Uncategorized

Wellbeing Economy

kimberleen

A Wellbeing Economy sounds like the perfect solution to the anti-human system that I keep going on about. The only thing is though how much would we have to decolonise ourselves in order to make it work. Only the other day I was involved in a discussion that looked at the impacts of the free food market and how it might impact food producers in the long run. As availability of free food might impact the need for food consumption. For some reason it made me think of the French’s appetite for very freshly baked bread and how that particular corner of the market may never be undermined by late free food. Maybe there in lies the answer or at least part of it. The desire for fresh produce. After all, fish does tend to go off. I’m still worried about all those cold climate Vegans though. Who am I to judge? I’m not  a permaculture specialist. I just wonder where all the soya and chickpeas come from. I’m sure somebody somewhere is going to give me a super intelligible answer.

I was listening to a really interesting radio show (How retro!) yesterday that was and examination of the Scottish Highland Clearances. It was a rather nuanced exploration tha looked at forced displacement and emigration as a result of the changing economic needs of society. When actually it was rather about the greed of the land owners within a feudal society. It was rather fascinating as it suggested that the uprising of the highlander or lack thereof came out of a deepening confusion of clan fealty. For me as an aforementioned splitter it’s hard to imagine that people would put such trust to a man of power, even your own kin. It’s a bit mental isn’t it. That basically you were made destitute and homeless by your own kin.

Anyways I wonder how all of that might work now. It’s had to imagine a world without hierarchical structures. Or even a world that agrees to a slow down of the economy for planetary welfare. Well I say that, that’s what we thought and knew only a few months ago. Yet here we are at the edge of The Great Pause, sitting a very different possibility of human and planetary existence. Who exactly is going back to work and why? Why have the government chosen to bail so many of us out? How are people surviving within the greatest known economic depression. Who is going to be the new Hitler and is there going to be a global war. Will it be based on a conspiracy theory or something that actually happened? Will the unmasked menace of white privilege finally wipe itself out with it’s own self-interested approach to life.

Five months ago I might have been writing about the possibility of a four day week and more localised work solutions and even mused on my own work practices (which allow time for emotional integration) .

Now when I think about the Wellbeing Economy it’s almost impossible to ignore that we might be collapsing into it. That I collapsed into it many moons ago after refusing to opt in to burn out culture. Things should take as long as they take. That’s the healer in me. Maybe even the creative. That the creative and the healer and instriabley link. Maybe that should be the basis of the Wellbeing Economy how creative and healers can work together to tell all the accountant to fuck off.

If you have enjoyed this article please consider buying me a ko-fi here.