Tag: Trauma

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Activists

kimberleen

Actually piss me off most days even though I am one. I look straight in to the heart of most activists and invisibly ask ‘tell me about your trauma?’ Tell me about your dysfunctional family? Tell me all about all about all the ways you feel unseen, unheard, dismissed,  disregarded, ignored? Tell me, tell me, tell me? Then talk to me some more? Tell me about the Palm Oil in Borneo? Tell me about the amputees in Gabon? Tell me about the child cancer victims that can’t get treatment? Tell me about the old lonely people locked in their houses? Tell me about the mental health patients that are so isolated by the system they get madder? Tell me about all the people that fall through the cracks? Tell me about the alcoholic single mother who was abused as child? Tell me about the neglected child with the alcoholic mother? Tell me how vulnerable children get abused in state care? Tell me about the still born babies that never got held? Tell me about all the dead babies in unmarked graves? Tell me of all the babies that were never given names? Then tell me of the people that die alone with no family? Tell me of the abused women to frightened to speak? Tell me about coercive control? Tell me about the impacts of prostate cancer? Tell me how processed food is killing us? Tell me about the benefits of a vegan diet? Tell me about animal rights? Tell me why all beings are sentient? Tell me about the indigenous population about to lose all their land, again? Tell me about the corrupt governments? Tell me how Justin Treudow is a sexy fraud? Tell me about propaganda? Tell me how Trump is a national hero? Tell how Trump is a facist? Tell me that Boris is alright? Tell me why you love The Union Jack? Tell me about the increasing rate of childhood obesity? Tell me about the starving children? Tell me about the starving children in the UK? Tell me about your Uncle that died of kidney failure? Tell me about the failing NHS? Tell me how the NHS saved your life? Tell me how you go through cancer? Tell me about the importance of indigenous knowledge systems? Tell me about your dying language? Tell me about what it feels like to be a black woman in a “white country”? Tell me what it’s like to be a black woman in South Africa? Tell me what it’s like to be a black woman immigrant in any country? Tell me what it feels like to not speak your own language? Tell me what it feels like to be scared of your own skin? Tell me what it’s like to be racialised by your hair? Tell me what it is to hate your father? Tell me what it is to have survived you husband? Tell me what is it to be ignored, beaten and brutalised by the police? Tell me of your torture? Tell me of your torture of both the physical and the emotional? Tell me of your troture both real and imagined. Tell me of your friends who have ‘disappeared”? Tell me of your past pain? Tell me of your future worry? Tell me of your living hell? Tell me why Eco-Anxiety is a thing? Tell me about the impacts of slavery on your life? Tell me about systemic racism? Tell me what its like to be a sex worker? Tell me why you are a sex worker? Tell me about your children in care? Tell me about your baby daddy? Tell me about your abusive mother? Tell me the impacts of your physical illness on your emotional wellbeing? Tell me about your workload? Tell me that you’re busy? Tell me about you overwhelmed? Tell me about all the causes you can’t keep up with? Tell me about your underearning? Tell me about long term unemployment? Tell me about homlessness? Tell me about drug addiction? Tell me about AIDS and HIV? Tell me about how your mother dies of tuberculosis? Tell me about how you see things? Tell me about why you hear voices? Tell me how the natural environment keeps you sane? Tell me? Tell me all at once? Tell me forever? Tell me the same story over and over again? Tell me the same story over and over and over again until it is changed or willfully forgotten. Scream me your pain. Wail me your terror. Burn away the ugliness and. Cut out the hard part. Bleed me your soul. Cry for the world and everyone in it. Swim in your sorrow. Water your dreams. Love your heart. Break the old to build the new.

Tell me of your birth trauma? Tell me how your wife left you? Tell me how the work doesn’t pay? Tell me about the natural disaster? Tell me about the flood, the famine, the wild friends? Tell me about the hurricane? Tell me about the tsunami? Tell me about your village that was destroyed? Tell me about the Tower Block theat burn down? Tell me about the negligent council? Tell me about the corporate greed of building manufacturers? Tell me about the burning of the witches? Tell me about womens rights? Tell me about menstruation? Tell me about land rights and why we haven’t got any? Tell me about the enclosures act. Tell me about Apartheid? Tell me that your grandfather survived the holocaust? Tell me about microaggressions. Tell me how you identify? Tell me what education means for you? Tell me what it was like to grow up in a cult? Tell me what it was like to grow up in a propaganda state? Tell me why Nelson Mandla was useless. Tell my why nothing has changed? Tell me about capitalism? Tell me about the anti-human system? Tell me about the perils of plane travel? Tell me about cultural appropriation?. Tell me about extractive economies and why they are harmful? Tell me about child labour? Tell me about slave labour? Tell me about emotional labour? Tell me about civil rights and freedom of expression?  Tell me about the refugees? Tell me about the neverending war? Tell me about nuclear weapons? Tell me about the Middle East Peace Process? Tell me what it means to be Palestinan? Tell me what it means to be Israeli? Tell what its like to work in antarctica? Tell me how your white privilege in fucking up the world? Tell me about plant medicines? Tell me about your psychedelic trip? Tell me how iowaska saved you life? Tell me about the impacts of chickpea farming and biofuel? Tell me why Tesla are bastards? Tell me why everyone else is wrong? Tell me the ways in which I can violently agree with you? Tell me about dehumanising language. Tell me how to change my language and use my words? Tell  me how controlling and annhiliting other peoples, communities, religion is necessary? Tell me why you only wear underpants woven out of your own pubic hair? Tell me why it is everybody else but you? Tell me why your frequency sucks and your life is a mess? Tell me why you will never be successful and we are all doomed? Tell me why you are a stoner and cannabis is the answer? Tell me why your right to alcohol is more important than a woman’s right to be safe? Tell me about your civil liberties? Tell me about your land trauma? Tell me about crime? Tell me about poverty? Tell me about connectivity poverty? Tell me why you haven’t got data? Tell me about the benefits of Cannabis? Tell me about the 1%. Tell me about education privilege? Tell me about the rights of the dead? Tell me about disabled access? Tell me about braille libraries. Tell me about clean water. Tell me about all of it, from the beginning to the end. Tell me the long story? Tell me the short version? Tell me where you lost your humanity? Tell me where you found it? Tell me what you dream of? Tell me what you love? Tell me what you aspire too?

Then after everything has been said that needs to be said. Feel it feel it all and just when you think you are finished, done,  completed. Then and only then act on it.  That the undervalued Art of In-Action.

If you’ve enjoyed this blog post you can donate here https://ko-fi.com/thelifedoula

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The Personal Is The Planetary

kimberleen

Can you see through the mist in your mind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story of the Broken Goddess

Personal Activism

Heal Yourself First

Gaia The Traumatised Goddess

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Generational Questions for a New Age.

kimberleen

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Wow I just realised Generationl = Gene Rational

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.

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Trauma Healing

kimberleen

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Trauma can leave you standing on the edge.

We are all fucking traumatised, have been traumatised and there is just no way round that. Life happens we get told shit by our primary 2 teacher and it sticks with us for life. Unless you’ve been working at the challenge or have a remarkably put together family,  you are more than likely quite fucked up and even if you aren’t that’s probably traumatising on its own. Guess what nobody can ‘fix’ it except you.

You literally have to be the change that you want to see in the world and commit to it if you ever hope to make any significant difference in how you feel. It is still ok to be radically flawsome in all of that too.

Trauma is real and many of us are dealing with its impacts every single day. For a long time, maybe a decade I’ve known that trauma lies at the centre of almost every life disruption. That we are living in societies and systems that spend most of there time gaslighting us then act surprised about trauma. All Trump and Boris are doing is making it very clear that both our governmental systems and our leaders are very unwell. You’d be insane to heed either of them. Yet here we are having conversations about bleach and staying alert hopefully to stories about drinking bleach. We are living in extreme times in every way. There are nearly 35,000 dead in the UK and the government keep telling us they are doing a good job. Did I mention the gaslighting?  If we were in a personal relationship like the one we have with the state, we would have all been institutionalised years ago. There is a reason why the Scots are known to be aggressive. We don’t like being lied to.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg as to a whole host of things that have been de-humanising us over time. A baby is born and your back at work after 3 months. Bereavement is treated as an inconvenience rather than a personal tragedy. Cardboard boxes are deemed an appropriate disposal method for a human life.

Work-life to has now been radically altered, maybe never to be the same again as people move away from the traditional job and god forbid the idea of the commute (Cause that was healthy). Interdependence seems to be the word of the year. As the anti-human agenda of the, capitalist system truly begins to sink in. Capitalism is a crock of shit that is designed to keep us stuck on the hamster wheel of hell for all eternity. Where is the life in that?

Beyond this and natural disasters, humans can be truly ghastly to one another. Religious wars, Colonialism, Capitalism, Genocide and then there’s just day to day murder and torture. Never mind the minor issue of global poverty and inequality that drive the whole negative cycle. People feel shit they do shit things in desperate attempt to go to better places or something as simple as safety. It’s remarkable that in the times that we are living in that adrenalin fatigue is a real illness and we aren’t even running away from lions. We are simply working so hard that we aren’t able to look after ourselves. That even with all our improvements, we are burning out trying to keep up with an unreasonable system that treats us as human-robot there to fuel production and profits.

Off the factory floor, the impacts are massive; breaking down families, breaking down tribes, polluting communities and driving us to social and planetary emergency. As a species, we have been through a lot. In the last century, we have developed technologies that are capable of bringing armageddon in the haze of perpetual war.

All of this stops when we begin to take control of our trauma. Hurt people hurt people. We need to heal our hurts rather than inflicting them externally. It’s all about truth and reconciliation.

Check out my email free series on brain trauma

Here’s Gabor Maté talking about trauma.

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The Birthing Process

kimberleen

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The blossom on the tree is not the end product yet it is the most beautiful part of the process. It seems to tell us a story about beauty that it is the blossoming. That real value can be hidden from us that the red flesh of the cherry tree might warn of danger yet if you are brave enough to bite through the dangerous flesh you will find delcious fruit

Right up until this week the primary focus of my work as The Life Doula has aways been Emotional Labour. Louiza Doran very kindly reminded me of.  Emotional Labour is largely the work or women and is the internal unpaid work we have to do in order for The System to function effectively. In addition to this Emotional Labour is our way to embody our collective wisdom, it also the way in which we navigate our own trauma; release and mitigate it on behalf of the collective. I was first introduced to Emotional Labour via a friend Natalie Swan, who had been reading Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown (which I still haven’t read yet due to the clusterburach that was 2019). Part of that Emotional Labour has been the slow-moving realisation that there just hasn’t been the language or terminology to explain what I do. Which left me somewhat forlorn and frustrated in my slow diligent movement forward through life. I’ve been delighted to discover that the language that I am looking for is that of decolonisation. And beyond this I discovered a knew word this week epistemic – relating to knowledge or the degree of it’s validation.

Mental & Emotional health have been colonised by the limited insight of science that is bound up in matter. The only way I have been able to explain The Life Doula being “that you wouldn’t leave someone in labour. Why would you leave someone in emotional pain?”

In the process of becoming The Life Doula I have had to unlearn and challenge much of what I have been told is true. That one-hour sessions are optimum so that clients don’t learn dependency. That offering too much value undermines the financial stability of your business. The thing is I’m interested in healing. In ways that only The Great Pause could highlight. Our world is fucked because we failed to pay proper attention or take due care. That all of my work and the approach that I take is painstakingly considered through the teaching of my own healing journey. Now the science is catching up with my own theory and I find that I have allies in the shared work of trauma healing. To my disbelief, I stand on the precipice of being an educator nor just a dessentor.

You see the informal healing culture of the west is covert, as it has needed to be to survive. “You’ll be needing a cup of tea” is short form code for you’ll be needing a long chat and some ritual connection. We have always known how to heal each other. It’s that our wisdom has been removed from us in favour of the linear precision of the surgeon’s knife. We would rather have things cut out of us than gently resolve our inner wars through presence of mind.

Our healing challenges are now systemic. That we have outsourced our intuition, sovereignty and our ability to heal; to people that have no connection to us. Our being, our lives, our place. That somehow the human spirit and body is one miraculous generic creation that can be ‘fixed’. I think not. This is why I am a doula, not a coach. I’m not interested in your productivity, functionality or civilisation. I’m interested in the jagged edges of your soul and how they cut you to ribbons at night, silently in the dark where your screams consume you. Maybe this can be best described as your Emotional Labour. Now we long for something else beyond the pain of oppression, repression and survival. We long to be heard honoured and cared for. These radical ideas of worth are the decolonisation of a species. The decolonisation of a planet. Where the forced extraction economies of Mother Gaia may be coming to an end, it’s all very symbolic.

One of the most valuable lessons that I have learned this year is that you can’t have true love without respect. Which seem very pertinent as I start my Birth Doula training. You can’t extract a baby and the creation of one under force isn’t recommended. All creativity stems from vulnerability both sex and birth are representative of this act. The truth is you can’t achieve human life through human individuation, nor can you achieve optimum human status without the support of community. It is our human connections that make us capable of bearing human life, as well as bearing the wait of pregnancy. Like everything birth and birthing are a process. Where it is once again hard to know where is begins and ends. Where thresholds are crossed both literally and metaphysically, a baby is born, just as the mother is birthed. Birthing is painful, life is painful. It is also exquisite, miraculous, beautiful and extraordinary as The Great Pause is amplifying that stillness, waiting and gestation all hold purpose. Nothing is conceived fully formed. Where would the fun be in that anyway? We have to honour what emerges.

I started out this year following a theme of rebirth returning to Scotland after several years abroad. What occurs to me now is that I am deep in a birthing process; is that I am only now creating a life, a practice and knowing that I conceived years ago. That I was not ready to bear. The deep truth that I was not ready to bear being me and all the very real things that I would have to lose in order to find respect aka love. That the birthing process is one of love, protection and care that cannot be commodified and doesn’t belong in a system that wishes to do so. That my real work is birthing the sacred in all of us where birth, death and trauma are inextricably linked.  Where the light meets the dark and the shadows create the sparkles.

If you want to find out more about my work with the The Red Tent Doulas please do get in touch. In the meantime please enjoy the below meditation from The Soul Matrix

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Life Doula

kimberleen

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I came back to Scotland, joined extinction rebellion and got sent a beautiful letter that was signed off, with Love & Rage. It gave me all the feels.

 

There is more than one life doula out there. I might not be able to say exactly what they do or how they do it but it’s certainly a thing. More recently I came towards the idea that the best way to really describe a Life Doula is as a Trauma Doula. Life can be very traumatic you know? The number one cure for trauma a secure attachment and that is the core of my work. I will literally sit with you in the dark, you can cry on me, snot up my favourite clothes and I will be very happy to be of service. Yes, I do appropriate hugging and holding. It’s all part of the healing process.

Not only that this year, yes  2020 I’ve finally been able to reach out to both Birth and Death Doula’s who get it. That makes me happy because have felt tribeless as I push towards the kind of care I know the traumatised deserve.  I’ve been claimed and that makes me feel like I have a tribe. It’s better than that though, I have found The Red Tent Doulas and am going to be training with them this year as both a birth doula and a death doula. Which makes me very very excited. What makes me most excited is the Alexandra Wilson who is also of Sacred Circles described “Doula work is like a trojan horse” that the work of the doula does much to bring into question current systemic approaches to life as we currently understand it. Doula work asks us to step away from the idea that we are human robots and take us back to both our origin stories and end stories. That we all belong and that in the process of being born, living and dying we are all far more deeply connected than we might like to acknowledge.

Healing both our lives and for me at least acknowledging our life-cycles is a very important part of our innate sovereignty as humans. You see the work that I do has hashtags for days. All of is important because all of us are important. We are living lives in defiance of our very nature. It’s why we are sicker, unhappier and yet at the same time healthier than ever. A return to some form of understanding of our sacredness can do us every kind of good as long as it is not informed by dogma. There is no right or wrong way to do things. No right or wrong way to be. Even no choice, is a choice but to be careering along with no connection to your greater being is something other. We were not intended to live like this. Being a Doula is taking ourselves to a very basic understanding of the deep value of life. That as human bodies we are witness to something, profound and unique. That we only have one of. That only we know. That only we get to live. Doula’s honour that process. We honour life. We want to use our lives to honour you in your deepest vulnerability. We are here in service, for the love of humanity.

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Ego Death & The Crushing System

kimberleen

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I’ve been tramping round Edinburgh to get to places cause money is a bit tight. The funny thing is that people feel sorry for me. After 7 years of being unable to walk around in the evening or at night, It feels like a total privilege to be able to enjoy what has come to be known to me as zombie time. Oh, twilight it’s nice to know you again.

So in my process of processing the term, Ego Death comes up. First of all, I do not in any way shape or form claim to be egoless. What I can say is that I’m stepping into me every deeper and exploring the inner landscape of shame in ways I’ve never been able to before. Maybe its because I’m turning 40 this year. Maybe it’s because I’m changing my approach.

Two things have happened to me recently one is getting a message from my Mother (who I’m currently estranged from) the other is having to get in touch with my old art college about course transcripts. Both have been triggering. Both have made me investigate my emotional landscape a little deeper. Even as I start to write about about it my anxiety rises and my self-harm ideation emerges and I very literally have to right now go deep into some somatic experiencing. I can feel the tingling of my skin the tightening of my chest and the emergence of ego as it’s rage and anger filled rant starts to emerge in my mind and I’m already getting up to the cup of tea and Instagram scrolling distraction therapy to not go there to deep. So I can stay here with you. You see I don’t think I talk about this part much. The fight. The fight to be here, to stay present, to keep going. To function while feeling and why the idea of ‘normal’ screams systemic abuse at me and makes me feel incredibly unsafe. You see for some of us and I’d like to think the growing part of the population that is becoming truer. The trauma levels are too high. The greenwashing, gaslighting bullshit is too toxic and I have to train hard to be able to deal with any of it. I know I am not alone.

Yet when I am out there posting my at-home selfies that don’t cater for outward appearances I feel like a failure. Like OMG seriously Kimberley again? You haven’t brushed your hair. How is anybody going to relate to this really? This must be so off-putting and then I realise that that is how most women feel all day, every night. That the pressure of appearance is crushing them, even when they have it all done. The hair, the make-up. The panic of office wear that has long left my life was a major liberation. I know for a lot of people that kind of freedom isn’t even on their radar. That I literally live a life of privilege every single day at home in a warm house with and internet connection in my pyjamas. You see and that’s when I think about it. That even the idea of self-care can be crushing. I mean I do brush my hair and teeth and I do do my four-step skincare most days. It’s just that because I work from home I don’t have to do those things immediately when I get up. Then some fab idea comes up and now I just hop online. Then even though I may be feeling good on the inside confident about what I’m saying my appearance doesn’t match my words. It poses big questions that although self-care might be for us what is it about ‘presentability’ that might be toxic. That people can’t see us as ourselves, at home in our pyjamas and does that work differently for men? So on that now I’m off to wash my face and grab some tea. To think about this a bit more.

I’m back.

Which takes me back to the thing I found triggering and why they interest me.  One I’m deep diving more and more into trauma recovery and the causes of systemic trauma which means a lot of deep diving for me personally. You see for me the personal informs the professional. I recently read somewhere (which I can’t remember) that they were thinking about naming CPTSD as a systemic disease. I’m not sure exactly what that means, except for me personally. So many things can be triggers if we are even slightly aware of the interconnectivity of everything how you connect with yourself is directly driven by how you were brought up and the family system you were or were not born into, will inform how you interact with the world.

Recently I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I am not ready to expose all yet. What I can say is that despite my trauma I do know that my family system made me into a change maker. You know why? Because I am playing out a polarity and using it to resolve my own trauma,  for which I am very grateful. It’s also allowing me to individuate in ways that I never imagined or managed. I’m learning so much about myself and my somatic experiencing about my family I’m quite simply shocked at the bodily feelings that come up for me. Like a few paragraphs before tears just started flowing down my face. It was purely a bodily response, a release.

The whole art school thing…well that. What I realise that through that horrific (Yes I do mean that) educational experience I would never have learned our understood exactly what it is to be complicit. How Systemic Abuse can be branded to look safe and how if we aren’t directly affected by Systemic Abuse we will still use corporate power to propel us personally and professionally even if we are well-meaning hippies.

So Ego Death…. what is it? Right now for me, it’s ending the idea of who you think you are or what you present to the world. I’m a lady that works in her pyjamas and old jumpers that don’t brush her hair until or wash her face until she is leaving the house. The weight of that truly feels enormous. Ego death isn’t anything to be afraid of. Most of us have already embraced it in some form or another when we donned our first uniform.

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The Global Village

kimberleen

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Imagination, Flow and Trauma.

kimberleen

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

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

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

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

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

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Community Building

kimberleen

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

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

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

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

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