A wise woman on whom I rely for guidance told me that this past week it’s been important to check my energy field to see if I’m carrying stuff that isn’t mine—from people I know, or from the wider world (Russian atrocities in the Ukraine, maybe, or the steady stream of mass shootings in the U.S.)—and release it, cleanse myself of it.
There are many ways to do this—she recommended lying on the ground, letting it drop away, letting the earth carry it—you can also even just take a shower and visualize it washing off you and down the drain.
I’ve had to learn these techniques to detoxify after working on books where I’ve had to hold, and fully feel, so that I could really convey, certain stories. I think of working on Zach Norris’ We Keep Us Safe and spending days researching the Chicago police squad that tortured more than a hundred boys into confessions of crimes they hadn’t committed… or working on Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s forthcoming The Trauma of Caste, and sobbing with her as she told me how every day Dalit (“untouchable”) people are mutilated and raped and ritually humiliated…
I’ve learned the hard way that when I don’t intentionally send those energies away afterwards, I get physically sick.
This wise woman’s guidance for the week had me thinking about how taking responsibility for this—especially those of us who are extra empathic (by nature or by training) and extra sensitive—is part of this project of getting free and staying free (truly free, not the freedom of gun-toting libertarians). “Oh yes,” she said when I mentioned it, “I see energy sovereignty as the first step in liberation.” Energy sovereignty, I thought admiringly, reflecting how when I usually see that phrase it refers to, like, a country breaking its reliance on fossil fuels.
It got me thinking about my motivation for this project—this life project as well as this writing project. I haven’t had nearly as many struggles to fight as the majority of humans on the planet (with my pale skin) (with my American and now also EU passport) (with my upper-middle class upbringing) (with 13 years of education at a private girls school) (with my diet of whole foods since birth, thanks to an old-fashioned mother who refused to let me eat prepared foods or, gods forbid, fast food) (with my gender matching my biology, although today I do wonder whom I would have become with less programming) (with my mostly heterosexuality—again with the question about programming) (As for being a person born with a uterus, I spent half my life feeling like I had plenty of power—the kind of power that half-naked 20-something rockstars twerking on stage consider empowerment, which only in my 30’s did I start to see as tainted by the patriarchy)…
My motivation (as best as I currently understand) came from being ensnared in relationships with narcissistic people, two key relationships in my life. After I managed to free myself of the second of them (inelegantly, thrashing around, and utterly lost for years after, no longer knowing who I was, where the edges of Ariane were), it led to this allergic reaction I have now to feeling stuck, trapped, or obligated—whether to/by a boss, a partner, or social expectations.
And that got me to thinking about how many layers there are to unpeel, unpack, in the project of liberation, how every time you see something, some dynamic, and manage to free yourself from it, there are always more.
My author Jon Alexander was just out visiting on his book tour for CITIZENS and that’s really the core of his idea: the task of first recognizing that our institutions, our behaviors, are restricted by this deep story we’re trapped in, a story that tells us humans are selfish and greedy, that there’s not enough for everyone, and so we must compete against each other, we have to make some people into Others. This limits every arena, even limiting our imagination—what we believe we could be or have, how we could structure our societies, govern ourselves, what kind of economic system we could have in place. Just seeing the story we’re trapped inside—that Revelation—is the first step. Only then can we step into a different story of who humans are, like the caring, collaborative, creative beings Jon calls the Citizen.
Which—finally (I feel like I could go on for pages but I want to keep this snack-sized)—links also to my current bedtime reading, The Dawn of Everything, this immense book by an archaeologist and anthropologist—the Davids, as I call them—two white dudes!—all of which (title, page count, authorship) sounds so unbearably pompous! In fact I find it such fun: humble and witty and mindblowing simultaneously—a glorious romp questioning all the “common knowledge” about the evolution of human societies and governance, leading to the conclusion that the nation-states, the violence and the wars, the exploitation that we have now are not a foregone conclusion, an inevitability.
It could have gone very differently, and it still could.
Unbinding - unbound