Something important is happening. It is gross. It is unpleasant. But it is important. We are being given a great opportunity. The lancing of a planetary boil. The purging of a planetary poison. In the moment leading up to the expulsion, in the dry heave on the cold bathroom tiles, the night sweat before the fever breaks, it seems excruciatingly endless. Too sick to stay awake, too sick to sleep, writhing, gut churning pain. It’s like Earth ate poori aloo on a Delhi side street and now has to wait for the dysentery to work its way through the bowels.
It seems like no corner is uninfected. The sickness is being diagnosed in our politics, in our entertainment, in our spiritual schools. Rapists in the Supreme Court, rapists making our movies, rapists leading spiritual schools. The abuse of power and consequent oppression of women, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, the LGBTQ community is systematic and rampant. It looks like hate is winning. That’s what it looks like. But is it true?
Just the way ingested poison solicits a response from a healthy body, poisonous systems evoke a response from a healthy public. Let’s face it, the systems that organize our society are not just sick, they are structurally rotten. They are based in misogyny and racism and run on fear. This is not new. What’s changing is our capacity to tolerate this.
It is very difficult not to fall into despair when faced with so much injustice, when it seems like hatred and violence are prevailing…but there is a trick.
Years ago, I lived in a tent on a piece of land which has since burned to the ground. I trained to tend fire for sweat lodges with a guy named Paul. He was an unassuming Indigenous man who chain smoked and said little, but who was warm and decent in a way that made me soften enough to learn. Sometimes when we would get too thinky about the things, too talky about what was going on in the world, he would just look at us and say “There’s nothing out there.” and it was just this matter of fact, totally un-woo-woo way of saying it that would make my breath short and eyes widen and for a moment I would believe him. There’s nothing out there.
If we pan back and remember the spiritual tenet “The external is just a reflection of the internal” and we can breathe that in, then, just for a moment we can forget all the enemies prepping for our ambush, all the booby traps set for our capture, and bring it all back to something navigable – ourselves. Because that’s what they say, you know, all the spiritual dudes. That everything is just a mirror. That you don’t see the world as it is, you see it as you are and every other fucking Facebook cliché. That there’s nothing out there. And if it’s true, if we can take that on board for a second, then this whole external crisis (whichever one you’d like to choose will do) takes a very different hue.
It is very easy, if we see this thing as something happening out there rather than in here, to want vengeance. To clamor for justice. I saw a feed recently on some social media binge delighting in the idea of giving men a curfew. Locking them in the house after sundown. I must admit its not without its appeal. The thought of wandering freely under dark skies with no fear of violence (because, duh, only men make violence) of wearing whatever without fear of sexual assault (again, because duh) and so on. The more the warmth spread in my body in response to the prospect of locking up the oppressors the more another quadrant of my being started to twitch in alarm.
The impulse is a very human one, to want to oppress your oppressor for having oppressed you. There is an idea we don’t even register that we have, and it is – not everybody can be free all at once. We scream for equality, but underneath there is a very alive and very human niggling to be on top, to take revenge – to be the one who is free. We don’t really want to shift the paradigm, we want to flip it. To tax the shit out of the jerky rich, to muzzle the mouthy white men, to strip the rights from the privileged, and as long as there is an us and a them it’s maybe even plausible. But if not?
There is real injustice, and there are real victims. When someone falls out a window and needs their limbs sewn back together it is not an apt moment for us to arrive and suggest; “My, you must have really lost your presence to have fallen out that window. Like, zero self-awareness, hey?” even if it’s true. Because they are hurt. They are bleeding, they need to take care of the wounds, and maybe they need to blame someone for having left the window open. Maybe they need to hate whatever had distracted them, and mistrust the stupid life that let this all happen. It is the same with everyone else who has been and who is being hurt by all this poison. People need to speak up when someone has abused their power. They need to protect others, they need to defend themselves and those who have acted in this way must be held responsible.
But there is a next step, and this next step is the only one which will ensure that this shift occurs.
The next step is that we need to look at what the hell is going on IN HERE (because there is nothing out there) that is reflecting as such a mess. It’s a big leap, I know. I have been sitting with this, trying to understand what in me could be causing this level of destruction outside of me. The discovery will be slightly different for all, but the line of inquiry is the same.
We know that we do things to our bodies that are utterly violent, from eating foods that we know are harmful, to smoking, not sleeping enough, having sex when we don’t really feel like it and a long list of others. We know we do it, and let’s face it – we only kind of care. We sometimes minimally make efforts to do it differently, but the basic vibe is – it’s my body, I’m only hurting myself and I have that right. Then we become outraged when we see corporations choosing their financial gain over the health of the planet, and we don’t see the parallel. That 5th cookie doesn’t feel violent to us because it gives us momentary pleasure and because we don’t view our bodies as deserving our protection.
Somewhere most of us can find this violence is by watching how we speak to ourselves. I have been watching the raging intolerance I have for the needs of my own body. For the unreasonable expectation that I have of production over all else. In other words, I watch the masculine in me being held in higher regard than the feminine. I see that I value what I accomplish over my capacity to connect or to create beauty in my life, that I resent my needs for rest and nutrition. That I want the body (the feminine) to give to me 24 hours a day without feeling the responsibility to give a single thing back.
Misogyny feels comfortable to me because my own inner masculine systematically disrespects my feminine. And I find that I sometimes enable this culture because, like water to a fish, it’s so normal inside of me that I barely even register its existence. Yes, I grew up in a sexist culture, but I, somewhere along the line, agreed to the terms, I signed on the dotted line and now it’s difficult for me to rest, to trust, to receive, to accept things as they are. I value achievement over connection. I strive rather than feel, and am quite pleased with myself when I do, and disappoint myself when I don’t. This choice may have been made out of desperation, when my psyche was too dependent and undeveloped to have the option to make any other, but that is no longer the case.
If I take the inquiry deeper, I find that I am waiting for respect. I am waiting to be saved. I am waiting for fucking Prince Charming to come rescue me and guide my life, because I don’t want to do it myself, and because I, as a little girl, was told that was my birthright. That one day my Prince would come. This is why my boundaries can be blurry and I have gone along with things that were out of integrity because they offered me a validation of some sort.
This is all pretty disgusting, but when I can see it, when I am aware of it, then I understand exactly why and how I am vulnerable to abuse. I can see why I tolerate it, why I gravitate toward it and it toward me. I can see the desperate need to exorcize myself of a whole slew of wacko ideas before I can really move toward equality. If I refuse to see this side I can’t really grow, because if this is not factored in then everything appears out of my control, it’s just shitty luck in a shitty world and there is no hope.
Here are some simple steps we can take toward dismantling the patriarchy:
1. We need to stop blaming men.
I know, it’s so fun. But we need to stop anyway. I have found myself in the last months paralyzed by the feeling that “men are so fucked up” but then when I in real time look around at the men who are in my life I realize these people are not the media monsters we watch on the idiot box. These are my friends, they are people. I have really good men around me. I actually have amazing men around me. Are they to be held accountable for Trump being the greatest wiener dog of all time more than I? Are they somehow more responsible than me? If I claim that I had no part in creating this reality, can’t they as well?
It’s easy to kind of say, no - because they are privileged and they blah blah. But this is just another way of separating us. THE thing that would definitively topple the whole motherfucker is if men and women learned to collaborate. If we could both stand in our power and give our gifts and appreciate and honor one another. Not in a New Age eye gazey kind of way but in a quantifiable, measurable solid stable way, where the ability to listen holds the same weight as the ability to talk.
So, as long as we find it juicy to blame them for everything that is happening is as long as we will stay in this. We, as a culture, create men who rape, and women who are susceptible to being raped. We have whittled the complexity of the human experience into grotesque cartoons. The only out is EQUALITY. Only equality will set us free.
2. We need to figure out how to hold our bodies in the same respect that we would the earth
And if we can’t, we need to figure out why.
3. We need to start taking responsibility for our own boundaries, our own pleasure, and our own experience rather than waiting for someone else to give us access to them.
We need to come back to ourselves, to connect in and find out what we want; what is ok for us, what is not ok for us and we need to find the will and skill to communicate that. We, not just women, but humans, need to stop looking to anyone else to define our worth, tell us what we should do. It’s true that we are disconnected from our truth, and that we have been deeply disempowered by the severance with our sensation, emotions, and our bodies themselves. But we can get that back. We must get that back.
There are two questions. The first is - What can I do to connect me to my body, my intuition, and my truth? And the second – How often am I doing that? How much time of my day to I dedicate to connecting to myself (be that through meditation, dance, breath, whatever the portal is for you)? This connection must be, like any connection with any human being, cultivated consistently.
4. We need to accept the fact that no one is going to save us.
I think that if this moment were to have a title it would be “No one is going to save us”.
And that’s ok, because we are going to save ourselves.
It is only from inside the belly of the beast, from entering our own addictions, and power games and learning how to stand up to and integrate our own inner tyrant that we will learn how to get out of this. If I can figure out how to get these seemingly opposing forces in me to sit down calmly and present their ideas I will have figured out how to mediate between these disparate forces outside of me. The information unlocked in my study of my own disrespect for myself will give me the key to how to stop disrespecting the earth and everyone who lives on it.
Deep in the mystery of our little breathing bodes lies the answer. The treasure map of all treasure maps, and like all good study we only get proficient by practicing. In letting go of the illusion that I am not as rabid and ignorant in moments as the worst of the worst out there will teach me about ignorance and rabies, and serve as a training to treat them as what they are – illnesses. Imbalances which have a cure.
It is only by individually overcoming this distortion that we can collectively overcome, that we can approach this as a poor set of decisions and a shitty defense created by a suffering entity rather than there being some group of bad guys out there.
Because, in the end, there’s nothing out there.
Artwork by my amazingly talented friend Kavita. You can visit her Etsy shop here