Tag: Trauma

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It Feels Bleak

kimberleen

It feels bleak this Thursday morning. South Africa is on stage six loadshedding which essentially means that there is no power for six hours a day or something like that. A state of disaster was declared a new Minister of Electricity was appointed and guess what South African’s just roll on. They barely look up from their coffee as the country slides into a little more chaos. Maybe it’s the flock response, maybe it’s amazing reslience training or maybe it’s just extaordinary to watch people operate with such grace under fire. In South Africa the hustle is real. There is no state hand out and very little support. It’s ride or die. You got to figure it out quik or you are quit. Lots of people get broken in the process. South Africa’s relentless very real existence down here in the Cape of Good Hope. The place that is heralded as the place of good governance, if of course totally systemically racist. You only have to look at thr local Khoi San land disputes to know that and block on afforable housing in Seapoint.

Why am I writing about this today? I suppose the answer is why not? As well as I’ve been thinking about marketing a lot. What’s my story, who am I what I am trying to tell people through my narrative. What is the narrative? A marketer that I was considering collaborating with asked me what do you want to offer through social media? My answer was simple. I want to offer people a process. What does that mean? I want people to be able to witness a human process. Which is my process. That it is not easy to be alive in the world even if you do claim to be a quantum manifestation rainbow practitioner.

One of my Trauma Doula’s in preparation posed a question the other day as to why some wellness practioners only want to focus on the good stuff. You know the acturian crystal light vision and things like that. It’s what some people might term as toxic positivity and spiritual bypasssing; of course the people immersed in those practices could never think that. The belief that underpins that is that talking about trauma attracts trauma. Of course if you know that your thoughts create things then it’s totally understandable why you might think that. However, I simple don’t think or believe that. More than this I think it this kind of thinking probably highlights the challenges of duality and polarity. Because trauma isn’t necessarily a bad things and the judgement of it as such highlights how misunderstood trauma really is. As a trauma geek that makes me sad, especially when we look at thngs like post-traumatic growth and as “What happened to you?” talk about post-traumatic wisdom. People who have trauma have super power.

As many of you will know trauma is physiological and it’s strange misinformed and misguided approach to both gaslight, victim blame and shame those that quite simply don’t have the ability to snap out of trauma. This behaviour in other equates to ablism. I doubt many of us would go around saying these kinds of things to someone with a broken leg for example and advocate that people with broken legs that pay attention to their broken legs attract more broken legs or even broken legged people. These attitudes a fly in face of what toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing believe that we do have the ability to create our own reality. We can choose what we manifest regardless of what our current circumstances are.

It’s also important to note that because trauma is physiological it requires such things as human care to heal effectively. So when faced with the physiological repsonses to trauma; I would say for those experiencing trauma the most important thing would be to identify people who have the knowledge and capabilites to effectively care for trauma. Given that you cannot heal from trauma alone this means having to find a safe friends group or therapeutic support system to help you through the process. I hope this helps.

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

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

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Safe Space Circle

kimberleen

The safe space circle came to me as a concept sometime last year. As a trauma specialist people often come to me with a lot of questions about self-destructive behaviours, toxic patterns and dysfunctional families and they want to know how to fix those things. The sad thing is that even in that moment when someone enquires it’s actually super difficult to start at the very base level; what is actually needed for that person, to even start to consider a healing journey. When people ask me about all of those things the first thing that I have to do is to help people figure out if they are safe.

At first glance it sounds both ridiculous and patronising to have to walk a grown adult through the concept of saftey. However I can tell you straight off that this process is not straightforward nor is it simple. When I talk about saftey in the context of trauma I am actually talking about two different forms of safety, physical safety and emotional safety and one cannot happen without the other. You see when trauma strikes whether it has been as a result of a one off traumatic incident or years of uncertaintly and life disruption; there is very little I can do for a person if they do not feel safe whether that is physically or emotionally and the two a intrinsically linked.

More than this people often speak to me about traumatised people they know and care for that often do not have either the capacity or resources to attend therapy. More than this the person who’s looking for some free advice that might get them through a tough challenge with a good friend I often talk about safety. The challenge is in a highly traumatised society safety in all forms these days is rare. There are very few of us that feel safe in our own skins, never mind at work or even at home. These conversations that are guided by care for another often demonstrate that the person who wants to help is also at capacity. That they simply don’t have the ability to look after another in the most basic ways and are too often struggling to cope with the stresses of modern life.

These days the stresses of modern life sounds like a convenient excuse for not being able to show up. However growing scientific research is clarifying how stressful modern life really is for humans and the traumatising impact that is having on human life and child development. The stresses of modern human life are a very real aspect of what is causing both personal and systemic trauma. That unless we turn back the dial on the way that human life is rolling out and how we are living there is not much that we can do in the growing epidemic of trauma and global mental health crisis.

Evidence is also growing that as a species not only are we completely out of sync with nature we are also totally out of sync with what were our natural family systems and how we should be living. Humans developed as part of intergenerational family groups where we were interdependent on one another. Now most of us live alone or isolated in small family groups with no immediate family or community to help us in our day to to day lives. This way of living is making us sick, creating additional stress that leads to emotional and mental health challenges. There is a growing need for humans to return to old ways of being in order to find wellness. The idea that a lone therapist or carer can fix and hold space exclusively for one person is an outdated one; that is impacting our ability to be well or create sustainable healing environments. We cannot heal in isolation. We need to be able to heal in community and work collectively in order to create greater wellness and turn the tide on personal and societal breakdown. We need to learn how to be in communtiy again.

Safe Space Circle is designed to create safety using the tools of community development to create equity practices that are based in diversity and inclusion. Creating equity is the very foundation of creating safety in groups unless we all feel seen, heard, understood and respected there is little that we can achieve collectively. Circling to is an ancient form of human communication that has been practiced through the ages. Creating safe space that we can share our deepest fears, show our true feelings and be who we really are and fully accpeted in this space.

If you you’d like to sign up for Safe Space Circle you can do so here

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

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Getting Back on the Band Wagon

kimberleen

What exactly does band wagon mean anyway? I like to think that it’s representative of some travelling Troubadours having and extistential crisis about there musical service to the Queen and literally having to leave the band wagon.

Anyways as some of you will have noticed and been aware that I have been what you might call away. However the truth is, is that I have been at capacity. Working with trauma is not easy. Working with ecojustice, women, indigenous rights, anti racism, decolonisation, a wellbeing economy and trauma work is tough. It takes a lot of emotional capacity to be involved in such things and sometimes I just don’t have it. Worse than that I consider blogging and writing to be a wellness practice. So you can only imagine where I have been and that feels sad for me. Of course nobody wants to hear about a trauma workers dwindiling capacity or about what now seems to be the cyclical nature of my compassion fatigue. That compassion fatigue is real or that priortising wellness in all area of your life can be challenging especialli while caring for others. I have at least stop saying that my life is busy and instead saying my life is full and my life is rich, meaningful and full.

To much social media and in fact media in general advocates for strong boundaries. However where does that leave you when you are dealing with infant children, disabled adults and the elderly. Although I don’t class myself as a carer, so many of us are doing this kind of work. Where we just have to accept that we might need to catch up with our needs late. However we sit in the paradox that if I am well then everybody is better. It’s not always that easy though and people in caring roles are all to aware of this. Dwelling on this thought takes me to the role of land guradians and their now deadly role as land defenders. I have two of these types in my immediate circles the death threats are real, the chronis stress is exhausting and the gas guzzling corprorations that are doign thes things just keep on going. You might want to talk about the extortionate wealth of the oil and gas companies in relations to your own fuel bill. I look at it as extortionate wealth that actively, consciously and legitimately destroys live and lifes on this planet. Hike’s in fuel prices for many of you are inconveint for some, deadly for many.

Then we have to take into account that we live in toxic is a toxic world, compiled of multilayerd toxic systems that impact on nearly every aspect of our live absolutely no one is untouched by this. I’ll say it before and I’ll say it again I beleive that we life and anti-human system and following on from a visit to the COP15 the UN convention on biological diversity I could also say that we now live in an anti-life system. It’s not just about us humans it’s about all the other earthlings too.

I’d like to say that my trip to the the COP15 was inspirational, uplifting, motivational. If you were expecting that I am sorry. All my worst imaginings were confirmed and worsened. I feel like I am now watching “The Don’t Look Up” movement in real life. Let’s be fair though I have always felt that way. Which might have more to do with my compassion fatigue than anything else this February. What happens when you find out that you are right? You see all my life I’ve looked out at the world and it’s madness and wondered it must be me. Why can’t everybody else see this? Why if I point it out does nobody care? Why if I talk about do very few people listen. The truth is I often still feel like that. However this year I feel like I have turned a corner. I don’t need to learn more, or be more, read more books figure more shit out or understand another person’s perspective. I am done. I am done being nice to ecocide advocates. I am done being nice to systemically traumatised people particularly men. I’m done being nice to people that won’t acknowledge and center indignous rights and knowledges as part of their process. I’m done trying to explain why your very vanilla word view is harmful. I’m done trying to cram PhD level knowledge about the decolinisation process into a five minute calls for your convenience, that you are not paying me for because somebody brought it up in board meeting and I am done being nice to those with colonlial inherticances that won’t acknowledge it. I’m done having to explain what a wellbing economy actually looks like when you don’t ascribe to capitalims as the solution. And finally I am done having to explain to people that don’t want to listen that trauma work and the acknowldgement of systemis trauma sit at the center of all that. I also feel like I have said all this before and have failed to stick to my boundaries. I need to be referring people to more books or these blog posts.

I realise now that not writing these blogs is at the source of what is holding me back. The answer always comes through writing, that is what I always find.

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

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

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Emotional Safety

kimberleen

I am actually a little shocked that I haven’t written about this before. I might even have it teed up as title for this year’s article titles. I do hope that the blogging is fimly back on my weekly to do list. I’ve missed it. Things seem to be settling down again and I am very pleased for that. It gives me and increased sense of emotional safety. I keep saying it like I can’t quite get over it myself it’s been a wild few years. I feel like I have a lot to fill you in on, like I didn’t have enough to do already. Here I am charging through my final thing on the to do list for today before loadshedding hits. I just checked to see if I had written a post about loadshedding too and it also seems not. So loadshedding is now added to the list of article titles for another time too. I am supposed to be writing about emotional safety and I supposed for me writing about emotional safety is where my journey starts with emotional safety.

You see I have a very active mind where the thoughts pile up like a car crash most days. Especially when I haven’t been able to write for ages or power through my to do list. I have to do my upmost to not let the ideas that I have run away with my life and indeed take over my thought processes completely. Writing is a wellness strategy for me. Mainly because there just isn’t enough space in anybody elses life to help me process my thoughts effectively. So I write and because I am then able to process how I feel without having to bother anybody to much. Writing it gives me and increased sense of emotional safety as well as a sense of emotional control. Don’t worry i do have friend I can always reasch out to and a long term therapist too. It’s just writing is my way of managing overload, writing give me clarity.

Emotional safety occurs when we feel safe to express ourselves fully. Which would seem obvious and yet it is not. Too many of us have grown up oppressed and denied our emotional processes leaving us repressed, neglected, isolated and self gaslighting; believing that we are too much, too difficult or complicated. When we are reduced to having to give convenent, emotionally contained one word answers to the very nature of our being it’s difficult to feel heard or even seen. Which can lead to a lot of anxiety, distress and emotional discomfort. Not feeling heard or seen can leave us feeling emotionally unsafe and scared about what we can and can’t say. Growing up and working in spaces where we aren’t able to fully be ourselves affects our ability to relate both safely and authentically and it’s common.

A lot of my work with emotionally safety has specifically grown out of working with women and specifically women of colour in past-apartheid south africa. Women of all colours have been and continue to silence as part of the legacy of apartheid. However men too also feel can feel societaly impacted by this kind of silencing, having to maintain gender sterotypes that are embued with toxic masculinity that only account for one emotion anger. If you are trying to understand emotional saftey and how it impacts you I would suggest that you take the time to explore your own emotional landscape. How many emotions do you feel capable of feeling, sharing and expressing, especailly in the company of others. Do feel able to tell people that you are feeling sad, angry or depressed? Or do you think that showing emotion is a sign of weakness and emotionality a source or personal shame? Once again it’s common to feel this way and it’s isn’t something you choudl feel alone with.

The way to creating emotional safety is to quite simply allow yourself to feel your feelings, you’re entitled to your feelings and whatismore it is good for your health. What can’t be expressed gets repressed and held in the body and can eventually make you physically sick if not properly addressed. The way through difficult emotions is to find friends and form relationships with people who do make you feel safe. That allow you speak and not only speak; speak all the way to the end. It really is that simple and it’s one of the reason that talk therapies can be so successful. Often we just don’t have the right people to talk to. To share our lives and our problems with. If you don’t feel that you have anybody that you can talk to whoo might share your world view of work through your stuff with it is almost certainly time to get a new friends group. Creating emotional safety is really easy once you find the right people who are willing to listen. More than this you will develop healthier relationships where you to can become a reliable person to hear someone out. At first it can feel really challenging to reach out and it might feel painful if you don’t make the right connection straight away. it might be hard but it absolutely worth. After all humans are both social and emotional creatures and we need healthy interdependent relationship to both survive and thrive in this world.

If you are interested in exlporing your emotionas further you can vist my ko-fi shop for some inspiration.

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

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The Great Reset

kimberleen

Happy Chinese New Year, where does the time go? And the years only run faster as you get older. After all time is not linear as I sit here on this particular upward spiral of the current Kimberley incarnation.

The good news is that I am back in Observatory, Cape Town the bad news is that I don’t know how long for. There is no doubt it has been and interesting few years and my achievements far outway my misadventures, which seem to have been rather few for an unconsensual nomad. Except of course that I ended up in entirely the wrong country one early morning last year; it all worked out in the end, with surprising ease.

This year it seems I have come back to the start of my journey in an unexpected and complete full circle moment, living only three streets away from my old address. It’s been interesting to be back with some old faces and new venues, the pandemic certainly seems to have taken it’s toll here. So many businesses shut down it makes me glad of all the photos I have of the old Observatory that I first knew. Observatory now seems more transient that I first considered, then I ask the question; where in the world hasn’t undergone a radical shift in the last three years? Who in the world hasn’t undergone a radical change? The world is changing and we change with it. Life is change.

This year I start in the aftermath of my life choices trying to find a clear way forward. All I really know for sure is that I have four Trauma Doula Preparation Courses to run this year and whole load of admin to catch up on. The nomadic lifestyle probably seems fantabulous, exciting and liberating if you believe the social media slide show. The truth is I am exhausted and desperately in need of some radical rest combined with some high speed digital decluttering.

Of course I am supposed to be a source of wild inspirations and deep insight that going to get yout through the next twelve months cycle of everything that you ever wanted. You can achieve anything that you want to. You can be anything that you want to and as somebody who has managed to do ten years of work during a pandemic I can assure you that all things are possible. I’ve seen things that I could never have imagined and had experiences that have moved me beyond my wildest fantasies. When it all comes down to it I am still just me. I still have the same dreams and aspirations I always have. To have a good life, near the beach. It’s simple. Keep it simple. There is magic everywhere. Especially in Cape Town. It’s good to be home in the Mother City.

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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The System

kimberleen

I get asked all the time what do you mean by ‘The System’? If I was a full-blown academic maybe I would have found a succinct way to conceptually replicate exactly what the system is? Maybe I’d be able to neatly package the systemic? In the most accessible version, it’s all the false realities that we are ‘forced’ to live with. It’s that thing we might collectively call bullshit. It’s all the things that we were born into that we didn’t consent to. All the things that we appear to have inherited as a result of human attachment to time and form. It’s all the systems that have been slowly fucking us collectively since the industrial revolution that are being caught out by the all-encompassing reality of climate change. These are the broad strokes of understanding the system.

It’s the nationalism you ascribe to cause you were taught it in the country you were born into. It’s the linear thinking that you embody because it both functional, productive and conducive to the capitalist system you were expected to exist in. It’s both the price and cost of religion, that believes that redemption is monetary. It’s money and the faulty economics of exchange that capitalism is based on. It’s the sickness system that you are paying to die into due to the industrialisation of food production. It’s the nutrient-poor land that we’ve been poisoning to eat. It the claustrophobic apartment you call home with no outdoor space. It’s the air you dare to breathe and the fresh clean live water that you cannot source to drink. That is The System.

You see it is often said that the only thing that survives us is love as and as an Art Historian what I know for sure is that objects and structures both the physical and the imagined can survive us too, usually with a far deeper sense of everyday meaning. Ideas can survive us. Yet for some reason we get all caught up on this love business. That is not to say that love doesn’t survive us. However what is that you really remember of your great great grandparents? You see more and more it becomes ever clearer in my reality that there is a great rouse going on. That somehow despite all the evidence. (That at this point might include the evidence submitted for Trump’s impeachment) We seem to believe that the society in which we live is built on higher ideals; that of truth, love, justice and honesty. It simply isn’t true. The age-old narrative of good vs evil is still alive and well with us today and we would be fools to believe that it isn’t an ever-present reality. Yet we do. Even though it tells us in all the great stories old and new that the corruption of power is central to the human narrative.

Conspiracy theories are abounding constantly asking us to question our truth. Yet so many of us don’t want to look at what is right in front of us. From the clothes, we wear to the food we buy and the media we consume. What is true for us? What is acceptable for us? Right now we live in a world of deep polarisation. Yet it has always been this way. The haves and the have nots. Have you noticed that we have one month of the year allotted (By fucking who?) to black history? That means black history only matters one 12th of the time. If you don’t understand whiteness then there is your queue. How is it the black history only matters one 12th of the time? It’s not that you are necessarily being lied to. It is that your narrative is being controlled. You are being told who you are and what to believe to serve an agenda. An agenda that is highly vested in maintaining the status quo and controlling power.

The narrative is off. It isn’t about them out there. It is about us in here. What is going on in your soul? What do you want to see for yourself and your family? Your life span? How is that rolling out in your life? And if not why not? Also, how is your agenda impacting others? Where are you holding onto control? It is often said that we live in an abundant world and that love is the most important thing, or indeed the highest value. If that’s true why are you scared? What are you scared of? If love is running the world why hasn’t everybody got enough to eat, clean drink water and a safe place to eat? For me when it comes to these big question we simply have to look to the system. If we were free to live then why would any of this be an issue? You see understanding, recognising the system is all about acknowledging all the ways that you aren’t free. That on day to day basis we come up against barriers that prevent us from living the lives we are capable of as a result of somebody else’s need for control. Who gave them the control and why? It asks us to question ourselves our way of life.

You can’t buy your way out of the system. You can give your way out of it. If you sitting in a shit whole or even better a shit stom you’ve been planted and like a tree you alone get to decide how you are going to weather the storm .

This article accompanies the Trauma Wise Circle.

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

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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.

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