Racism, Recovery & Right Action

Enjoy this 8-minute read and/or listen to the recording at the beginning of the post on my website. 

Several years ago, while living in a meditation community, I was really struggling with… well… just about everything. And I was tired of everyone around me trying to make me a happier person. That aspiration felt shallow and forced to me. Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes, like all the other emotions. What I really wanted was to live a rich and meaningful life without being at war with myself and my circumstances.

A fellow resident handed me his copy of Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul, and it was the beginning of my journey with somatic work, taking both my psychological and spiritual healing to a deeper level through focusing on the experience of my body in the present moment. In a recent podcast with Sounds True, Singer describes these key steps in the process of surrendering to reality and accessing right action:

1. When upset or agitated by an experience, a memory, or a decision to be made, ask what desire or resistance is motivating you. Is there something pleasant you are trying to get, or something unpleasant you are resisting? Remember that there is no ultimate safety or satisfaction to be found, and that acting from the compulsion to cling or avoid muddies your clarity and compromises your impact.
2. Let the energy move through your body through sensation, emotion, or imagination. You’ll know this is happening when you feel a sense of relaxation, spaciousness, upliftment, relief, well-being, and possibility.
3. Once still and quiet, inquire into what is needed from you in this moment or through the decision you are facing. If you are whole in yourself and motivated to be of service to the world unfolding around you, what is the right action?

The recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations have shown me how vital such a practice is. It’s easy as a white person of privilege to get stuck in feelings of shame, to defensively deny the reality of the Black experience in America, or to jump into compulsive, ultimately ineffective action just to relieve my own discomfort. Living with chronic illness and addiction gives me a seductive excuse. I just don’t have the physical energy or emotional resilience for activism. But many Black Americans are more chronically sick and traumatized than me, and they show up for the fight every day because they have to.

The struggle of Black people in America is real and requires specific attention due to the history of slavery and oppression in our country. The feelings this brings up in white folks like me are real and need tending. We all have our own gifts and limitations that make certain types of action more or less accessible. And there is something each of us can do.

For me as a white woman to not take clear anti-racist action means I am racist, enjoying the privilege of a system that enables me to completely ignore the issue of race and still achieve a life of safety, connection, and meaning. If a close friend or family member was suffering it would compromise my well-being and I would do something to support them. Choosing not to take action because of the racism in this country is, in essence, saying that black lives don’t matter to me. And that’s exactly the point of the millions of people who have been chanting: “black lives matter”.

So what do we do about racism? About modern -day slavery? About the landscapes and species that are being eradicated? About anything that matters deeply to us? How do we step into that thing we were born to do that no one else can do, or even that one thing I can do in this moment?

I do what Michael Singer teaches. And what 12-step teaches. I let go of compulsive action, let the energy flow through me, find that place of stillness within, and ask “What is the next right thing for me to do?” Sometimes we can’t find a place of wholeness and stillness. Sometimes the world is on fire and we need our grief or outrage to send us fearlessly into the burning building to save whatever lives we can. But issues of systemic racism and environmental collapse are too broad and complex for such heroics. They take the innovation and endurance of our fully resourced wholeness.

But how do we find and cultivate wholeness in a world full of uncertainty, distraction, and separation? And how do we come to understand what is ours to do and how to do it?

A recent 5-day on-line soulcraft immersion with the Animas Valley Institute gave me a starting point for answering these questions:

• Our psyches contain four main facets of wholeness and four categories of fragmented, protective parts. As we come to know and heal our fragments, and cultivate and embody our wholeness, our inner ecology becomes more diverse and resourced.
• Working with emotion, sensation, dialogue, and imagination in relationship to the natural world, where our psyches have developed over millenia, gives us the support and container we need to access our wholeness.
• As we attune more deeply to the wild world within and around us, we become more fully alive with feeling, conversation, and imagery that hold clues to our unfolding purpose and the way we were born to be of service to the healing of the world.

As one of our guides, John Lynch, so brilliantly put it, “Soul knows what is worth doing, but has no idea how to do it. Ego knows how to get things done, but doesn’t know what’s worth doing.” Soul isn’t concerned with safety or propriety. As he put it, if it were just up to Soul, he would be drinking poison and howling naked in the streets. I recognize that one reason I struggle with addiction is because I vowed at a young age to live a life of Soul, thinking that was all that was needed. 12-step has been a rocky journey for me, because making Soul my Higher Power, as the most godly thing I know, only makes things more unmanageable. We also need our nurturing, generative adult, our wild indigenous one, and the trickster sage to keep us balanced and to make the action we take sober, effective, vital, and sustainable.

Here is my best understanding of what is mine to do, based on what I know of myself and the world in this moment:

1. Speak with my white friends and write to you about what I know of racism in this country. That is an action I am resourced to take, and a good use of my gifts, and I know it has sparked movement in at least one person’s life.
2. Commit to fostering a deep relationship with my inner nurturing, generative adult for comfort, guidance, and the capacity to follow my calling in deeper and bolder ways.
3. Continue to practice and advocate for nature connection and artistic expression as key to personal, collective, and planetary healing.
4. Increasingly align my work and relationships with this vision so I have fertile soil to root more deeply into healing, wholing, and cultivating my relationship with Soul.

As Rumi says, “Do not try to see into the distances. That is not for human beings.” Deep listening requires developing the capacity to tolerate constant chaos, desecration, and uncertainty. The age of The Hero has ended. What we face is too broad and complex for any one person to unravel. But we can each listen to what the earth is saying we are uniquely prepared to do to help her, help ourselves, and help each other.

Nancy