I've been thinking lately about the difference between tuning in and tuning out. And about how everything – including notions of mindfulness and regulation that are based in teachings of connection – can be twisted and sanitized, or even weaponized, through the already-embedded distortions of white supremacist capitalism, or by fresh propaganda they spin to patch the cracks, to disconnect us from each other, to keep us docile.
To keep us complicit.
Trying to stay always calm and happy within systems of brutality, abuse, and oppression means tuning out our pain and that of others, which means disconnecting from our bodies, where we feel this pain and know the wrongness. “Regulation” of the nervous system doesn’t mean always staying calm (in Buddhism this is equinimity's "near enemy" of indifference/passivity). It’s definitely not always being in control of things, or always following the rules or social norms, or always being happy. But rather, it's an ability to be with what is, including when it’s uncomfortable and painful, and from that basis of feeling how things are, allowing the movement to respond, in feelings, in words, in actions. Regulation isn't stillness. Healthy regulation means things can move, including between emotions and nervous system states; it is a tuning in, not tuning out. A returning to oneself, again and again; to one's body, one's values, one's wisdom, and one's abilities to feel and speak with authenticity, truth and solidarity.
From this perspective, embodiment can mean taking responsibilities for our own layers, history, and aliveness. Practicing releasing what's not ours (generational, social, norms, feelings, reactivities), while taking accountability for what is our (feelings, words, actions, impact on others, privileges and their history, values).
And right now in this world, tuning in, staying open, staying connected to oneself and empathy means feeling the pain of the immense brutality and injustice and atrocities that continue to mount. The writer/humanist/anti-racist teacher Ijeoma Oluo reminds in aPrentis Hemphill Becoming the People podcast episode that "a genocide is supposed to be upsetting. It is supposed to be unbearable. We aren't supposed to be able to bear these things.... and the world tries so hard to pull us away from our bodies and pull us away from what we know"... our inherent ability to feel pain of others and to thus want to try to stop the causes of their suffering.
We are witnessing unbearable live-streamed violations of human rights and dignity, and unbearable displays of the cruelty and hate and violence that humans are capable of. And also distorted mass-gaslighting around all the evidence that we can see with our own senses. This means trying to keep us disconnected from our senses, from our whole embodied selves, so that we stay disconnected from our empathy, compassion, and the natural connection we have with other lives.
It's not supposed to feel good to bear witness to such immense violence and cruelty. To see it, to hear it, to feel the reverberations of immense suffering in our own hearts. It's supposed to make our alarms go off wildly because we are witnessing a massive disregard of human dignity and the brutal destruction of our kin and also our earth.
Furthermore, witnessing ethnic cleansing and genocide – not only being permitted, but being supported to continue and increase – also means danger for all of our rights and survival.
But it's not just the current white supremacist and colonialist narratives that tell us "we aren't connected to and shouldn't care about" the suffering "over there" (whether "there" is across the street or across the world). These narratives have for generations shaped our very experiences of what it means to be a body-heart in this world. We have spent our lives and generations before us socialized to ignore, to not see, to keep fragmented, to keep distant from, to keep silent about, to feel shame around parts of our and other bodies, identities, and experiences of life. We have been taught to be disconnected from our bodies and breath and each other and the land, and yet... And yet, the felt-sense of connection still lives in our body-hearts, in a deeper place than what has been suppressed and fragmented by all the conditioning towards disconnection, competition, suppression. Despite layers of personal, generational, and social traumas. In the same way that to really feel the breath also means feeling that it is both inside me and outside and that these breaths are shared with so many other beings, to return to embodiment is to return to the embodied-knowing of the connection with others and with the land itself. And the right of return cannot be revoked.
Disconnection and generations of trauma and supremacy-conditioning have led us here, and everything I know in my mind and body and from the wisdom-teachers of our times tells me that the path forward has to be through the discomfort of returning, releasing, relearning, re-feeling, accountability, repair, and reconnection. Reconnection with the delicateness of life. Reconnection with grief and space for the grief of the past that has never been processed so continues to create domination and violence in the present. Reconnection with solidarity. Reconnection with nature and the land that we belong to (not the other way around) - and all this happens only through reconnection with our own bodies and layers and deeply-feeling hearts.
What do you need in order to be able to choose to stay with, and move more in, the wisdom of your body? To keep returning home into the compassionate heart that is big enough to keep feeling and loving despite all that is unbearable right now?
What do you need to be able to stay connected to the place in your own body-heart that can feel the constant heart break all around? What does it mean to let our hearts crack open each day as the cost of caring about others, keeping alive our capacity to feel the world, and our ability to feel our interconnection? What does it mean as the structural costs become higher and there are more consequences externally for many people living authentically or speaking out or wanting others to be safe and free? I am constantly asking myself these questions and do not always know the answers nor the actions. Except that for me (and my social positioning and privileges) I know the cost of just silence is too high – both for my soul (the disconnection from my values and shutting out my body’s ability to feel) but also for my own possibilities of freedom and survival.
Liberation is collective, and returning to our embodied selves again and again is part of the continual practice of saying "No" to this 500-year history of white supremacist colonialist stories of separation and domination that live through our bodies. A constant practice of awareness and saying “No” and unwinding, to these threads that have been and are constantly being wound around us, strangling our abilities to be whole, connected, and free – and in some cases, to just be alive.
It doesn't mean we need to or can be constantly in a state of overwhelm. So what do you need, in terms of rest, in terms of resources, to be able to stay connected to your wholeness and humanity? To come back into regulation as balance, as movement, as the ability to feel and feel-with? By coming back to our centers again and again, by resourcing in the different ways that we need to, by re-learning rest, by getting and giving support to each other, by trying to learn again how to collectively grieve, we can practice connecting, unwinding, bearing witness, speaking up, seeing and listening to each other and ourselves. We can strengthen our abilities to hear our internal wisdom and to move from this place in the world. As a continual practice.
And hopefully be part of the collective voice saying "No" to all these unbearable injuries to human dignity and this earth's sustainability, and become parts of the collective body weaving towards our collective liberation
Looking forward to supporting you coming home a bit more into your own body-heart groundedness, into your discomfort, grief, letting go, and wisdom. So that you can feel more free to feel and move in your own full truths. And so we can keep grieving and working together, each in our own ways, towards a dismantling of systems of brutality and disconnection, and towards our collective liberation.
~Rachel
15 May 2025
To keep us complicit.
Trying to stay always calm and happy within systems of brutality, abuse, and oppression means tuning out our pain and that of others, which means disconnecting from our bodies, where we feel this pain and know the wrongness. “Regulation” of the nervous system doesn’t mean always staying calm (in Buddhism this is equinimity's "near enemy" of indifference/passivity). It’s definitely not always being in control of things, or always following the rules or social norms, or always being happy. But rather, it's an ability to be with what is, including when it’s uncomfortable and painful, and from that basis of feeling how things are, allowing the movement to respond, in feelings, in words, in actions. Regulation isn't stillness. Healthy regulation means things can move, including between emotions and nervous system states; it is a tuning in, not tuning out. A returning to oneself, again and again; to one's body, one's values, one's wisdom, and one's abilities to feel and speak with authenticity, truth and solidarity.
From this perspective, embodiment can mean taking responsibilities for our own layers, history, and aliveness. Practicing releasing what's not ours (generational, social, norms, feelings, reactivities), while taking accountability for what is our (feelings, words, actions, impact on others, privileges and their history, values).
And right now in this world, tuning in, staying open, staying connected to oneself and empathy means feeling the pain of the immense brutality and injustice and atrocities that continue to mount. The writer/humanist/anti-racist teacher Ijeoma Oluo reminds in aPrentis Hemphill Becoming the People podcast episode that "a genocide is supposed to be upsetting. It is supposed to be unbearable. We aren't supposed to be able to bear these things.... and the world tries so hard to pull us away from our bodies and pull us away from what we know"... our inherent ability to feel pain of others and to thus want to try to stop the causes of their suffering.
We are witnessing unbearable live-streamed violations of human rights and dignity, and unbearable displays of the cruelty and hate and violence that humans are capable of. And also distorted mass-gaslighting around all the evidence that we can see with our own senses. This means trying to keep us disconnected from our senses, from our whole embodied selves, so that we stay disconnected from our empathy, compassion, and the natural connection we have with other lives.
It's not supposed to feel good to bear witness to such immense violence and cruelty. To see it, to hear it, to feel the reverberations of immense suffering in our own hearts. It's supposed to make our alarms go off wildly because we are witnessing a massive disregard of human dignity and the brutal destruction of our kin and also our earth.
Furthermore, witnessing ethnic cleansing and genocide – not only being permitted, but being supported to continue and increase – also means danger for all of our rights and survival.
But it's not just the current white supremacist and colonialist narratives that tell us "we aren't connected to and shouldn't care about" the suffering "over there" (whether "there" is across the street or across the world). These narratives have for generations shaped our very experiences of what it means to be a body-heart in this world. We have spent our lives and generations before us socialized to ignore, to not see, to keep fragmented, to keep distant from, to keep silent about, to feel shame around parts of our and other bodies, identities, and experiences of life. We have been taught to be disconnected from our bodies and breath and each other and the land, and yet... And yet, the felt-sense of connection still lives in our body-hearts, in a deeper place than what has been suppressed and fragmented by all the conditioning towards disconnection, competition, suppression. Despite layers of personal, generational, and social traumas. In the same way that to really feel the breath also means feeling that it is both inside me and outside and that these breaths are shared with so many other beings, to return to embodiment is to return to the embodied-knowing of the connection with others and with the land itself. And the right of return cannot be revoked.
Disconnection and generations of trauma and supremacy-conditioning have led us here, and everything I know in my mind and body and from the wisdom-teachers of our times tells me that the path forward has to be through the discomfort of returning, releasing, relearning, re-feeling, accountability, repair, and reconnection. Reconnection with the delicateness of life. Reconnection with grief and space for the grief of the past that has never been processed so continues to create domination and violence in the present. Reconnection with solidarity. Reconnection with nature and the land that we belong to (not the other way around) - and all this happens only through reconnection with our own bodies and layers and deeply-feeling hearts.
What do you need in order to be able to choose to stay with, and move more in, the wisdom of your body? To keep returning home into the compassionate heart that is big enough to keep feeling and loving despite all that is unbearable right now?
What do you need to be able to stay connected to the place in your own body-heart that can feel the constant heart break all around? What does it mean to let our hearts crack open each day as the cost of caring about others, keeping alive our capacity to feel the world, and our ability to feel our interconnection? What does it mean as the structural costs become higher and there are more consequences externally for many people living authentically or speaking out or wanting others to be safe and free? I am constantly asking myself these questions and do not always know the answers nor the actions. Except that for me (and my social positioning and privileges) I know the cost of just silence is too high – both for my soul (the disconnection from my values and shutting out my body’s ability to feel) but also for my own possibilities of freedom and survival.
Liberation is collective, and returning to our embodied selves again and again is part of the continual practice of saying "No" to this 500-year history of white supremacist colonialist stories of separation and domination that live through our bodies. A constant practice of awareness and saying “No” and unwinding, to these threads that have been and are constantly being wound around us, strangling our abilities to be whole, connected, and free – and in some cases, to just be alive.
It doesn't mean we need to or can be constantly in a state of overwhelm. So what do you need, in terms of rest, in terms of resources, to be able to stay connected to your wholeness and humanity? To come back into regulation as balance, as movement, as the ability to feel and feel-with? By coming back to our centers again and again, by resourcing in the different ways that we need to, by re-learning rest, by getting and giving support to each other, by trying to learn again how to collectively grieve, we can practice connecting, unwinding, bearing witness, speaking up, seeing and listening to each other and ourselves. We can strengthen our abilities to hear our internal wisdom and to move from this place in the world. As a continual practice.
And hopefully be part of the collective voice saying "No" to all these unbearable injuries to human dignity and this earth's sustainability, and become parts of the collective body weaving towards our collective liberation
Looking forward to supporting you coming home a bit more into your own body-heart groundedness, into your discomfort, grief, letting go, and wisdom. So that you can feel more free to feel and move in your own full truths. And so we can keep grieving and working together, each in our own ways, towards a dismantling of systems of brutality and disconnection, and towards our collective liberation.
~Rachel
15 May 2025
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