walking home
About nine years ago, in the unmoored months after someone dear to me died, when I found myself quite literally needing to feel the ground beneath my feet, I began to hike.
In the beginning, I approached these hikes from a need to move through difficult energy. With headphones streaming music into my ears from the time I laced up my hiking boots to the moment I took them off, I experienced the time on the trail as a time to be lost in my own thoughts. I saw the whole process as a nice venue for exercise, and at best, as a means to get something, such as relief from a stressful afternoon at my laptop, some sensory delight, some proprioceptive stimulation.
I unconsciously related to the land as something from which to extract benefits.
But as my reliance on my ritual of hiking these trails deepened, the experience itself began to transform.
A Gentle approach
Transforming the inner oppressor
If you’re feeling distress or helplessness about the increasing polarities in the wider world, read on for this month’s essay about how I worked with my own internalized ableism, sexism, and colonialism, and how doing so allowed me to resolve inner conflict and create more room for ease in relationship with self and other.
When we turn inside and bring curiosity and compassion to our parts, we can heal our inner struggles. But we also might find that our new spaciousness inside contributes to the dissolution of some of the tension outside us, too.
Perhaps we might even begin seeing others not as threats, but as collaborators in the human version of a murmuration.
befriending the fawn
Fascism requires a compliant population to take hold. This month’s blog is about getting to know my fawning, or compliant, part, and developing a relationship with it, so it no longer has to work so hard, allowing me to lead more often with courage and compassion.
When we befriend our fawning parts, we may find that our compulsion to blindly comply with authority out of fear begins to dissipate. We then become one fewer body through which fascism can spread. Our inner work expands outward from personal benefit into a contribution to a collective transformation of consciousness. We become, as they say, the change we want to see in the world. This is a kind of internal activism we all have access to, that can yield sustainable external change.
Kneecap, Ancestral Memory, and Finding Healing in Unexpected Places
Who is speaking?
