Dear Ones,
I want to share something with you, and I don't quite have the language developed yet, so it's gonna be a bit of an exploration - it's around our inter-dimensionality as human beings and how that's directly related to our capacity to truly love, have clarity and compassion.
I've been working with groups of people since my early thirties, and I think my big wake up was around people's capacity to, as we say, walk a mile in another person's shoes because people have so much of their own trauma, their own self-healing, to do, recovery from guilt and shame and self-loathing and trauma scores. All the things that we are having to navigate as human beings to varying degrees. It really takes up so much space that it can be challenging for us to have enough space to love in bigger ways.
As I've been working with groups of people and seeing where people's edges are - like why someone wasn't able to move into an anti-racist worldview for themselves, why someone wasn't able to feel compassion for another person who maybe was unconsciously causing harm, why somebody would go into a deeply judgmental place, but call it part of their spiritual tradition, why someone wasn't able to see how focusing on women in my work didn't mean it was against men. It's like this capacity thing where people are polarizing in the spectrum of left to right, right, wrong, up, down ~ that whole thing. Sort of snapping between the poles and not able to find a medial ground where they could look both ways and consider more than one perspective at once.
I really started to wonder - is this a brain, heart situation?
Have we actually not evolved the way that we need to for survival because we're not actually wired for loving enough? Is the heart field and the brain field not overlapped and woven enough? Is it that we're not conscious of how these heart and brain waves can work together to expand our capacity to see? Is it because we don't understand that we are interdimensional beings, meaning that we have a physical body, but we also have a field and that we talk about ourselves like we have a soul and an identity and a spirit, but we haven't really done the work to explore what that even means? To have these sort of non-specific qualities of human beingness, but that we talk about all the time. Was this the problem of understanding how we see ourselves ~ or is this literally a wiring problem? Like we don't know how we live “in here” in this body,. and therefore we don't know how to operate this thing called a ‘human being’.
In particular, when I think about anti-racist work, and I think about what, at least here in our community, we're asking people of European descent and white people, whether they identify as white people or not, but who are experiencing white privilege - we are asking people to become aware of how to do this work at a deeper level.
The first 10 responses of seemingly awake people are almost patterned responses of defensiveness and misunderstanding. Those of us who are deep in the work know that we are many layers in and haven't even gotten where we're going yet. And we're making the attempt to understand big concepts like how people say: ” Well, how can I be responsible for what my ancestors did?“
(sidebar not in the audio ) If you were part of any tradition that wasn’t culturally rooted in the ancestor aspects of life and death - then you would not already have an ancestor understanding - unless you took a workshop - and learned it or studied with someone who included them. If you weren’t raised with it - you might not be able to connect with the ‘feeling’ of doing work on behalf of ancestors. Then some have said they don’t want to connect with the bad energies of the past….Then there is this: early Christianity, Orthodoxy, included Ancestors - but anything from Catholic forward did not include them in a conscious way - they brought in the Saints but not the Ancestors in the way we are talking about it in race work. By Ancestors instead of just those who have died that we remember - this is an awareness of their presence in our lives and in the unfolding story. So again - asking someone to care about ‘what their ancestors did’ when they don’t have a relationship with them - isn’t working. We are disconnecting from feeling because we never had the feeling in the first place. I am exploring this because I want to see where we are breaking down and what we can do to create change and impact. For all of our sakes. And because anti-oppression work started in my own famliy - (if you listen to the audio you will hear about my step-father, Robert Lee Grant.
When I look at the energy and the somatics when I ask that question, I feel like we literally aren't wired to feel the feeling of being a part of a bigger story. It's like we're not actually capable of receiving the experience of what it means to consider being a part of what our ancestors did and being willing to be a node in the big constellation of reparation. It's like people can't quite hold it…
(this isn’t the entire text)
This is description of the book by Robert Lee Grant, my step-father from when I was 8. Memoir of a brash PhD in economics who was a special assistant in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and who lost his job for his outspoken criticism of the Nixon administration.
Expanding Our Capacity to Love