social justice

Whiteness and Fear with the Animal Spirit Oracle

3/31/18–I am breathing some life back into this blog and starting by publishing things that I wrote but never made public. This was written in February of 2017.

Last week, I did a deck trade with Alaina of Exploringly Yours and got the Animal Spirit oracle by Kim Krans of the Wild Unknown. I’d seen this deck when it first came out, but, while it looked nice, it didn’t look like something I’d want to shell out $60 for (the cost of the deck and guidebook, since I really felt like I’d need the guidebook with this one.)

However, I’m glad that I decided to bring this deck into my life. I want to talk about the first reading I did with it, which was pretty amazing. I’ve been sitting on this reading for a few days, thinking it through, although to be honest I got about 90% of what I needed to get from it right away.

The questions I asked were about whiteness, racism, and white privilege, but they’re not the same ones I would have asked 5 or 10 years ago. As I’ve said before, the question itself is as much of an indicator of where we’re at than the answers we receive. These questions crystallized in my mind in a more intuitive way. My four questions were:

What am I afraid of?
What vulnerability do I not want to be exposed?
How do I hold myself?
What do I have that can’t be taken away?

These might not be the questions that you would ask about the very same topic, and on the face of it, they don’t seem to have anything to do with race. Nonetheless, the Animal Spirit deck went really deep, really quickly. Note that this was pretty much my first reading with the Animal Spirit deck right out of the box, so when I saw this, I knew this deck and I would get along very well!

What am I afraid of? Eagle

In this deck, Eagle signifies truth–truth that just might swoop down like a giant bird and pluck you out of the river. The kinds of truths that we are learning are indeed scary and painful, as well as glorious and liberating. I’ve spent most of my life complicit in various systems of oppression, and pretty much every single minute of it living on stolen land. The beautiful old buildings at my undergraduate university were built by slaves. But beyond those facts, it’s painful to touch the rage and sorrow that I hear when indigenous people and people of color speak about their and their ancestors’ experiences living under white supremacy. There’s simply no way of denying that pain (although I’ve seen white people try like crazy to derail and minimize it.) It hurts to know that people have gone through such terrible things, and it hurts to know that they’ve suffered because of a system that’s ostensibly trying to protect people like me.

What vulnerability do I not want to be exposed? Panther

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that a Black Panther showed up here. Panther performs the same function in Animal Spirit that the Tower performs in tarot: clearing away old structures and systems that don’t work.

But what this card showed me is where I’m still clutching my pearls–hard. Because here’s the truth: as a white person, even one committed to ending white supremacy, the idea of ending white supremacy still stirs up deeply conditioned fears. I don’t like to admit this; I’d like to say that I’m 100% down with the revolution. Intellectually, I am, yes. In my heart, I am, yes. But that doesn’t change the white supremacist conditioning I have been experiencing since pretty much day 1 of my life.

Conditioning goes deep, and I’ve long understood that undoing it is a lifelong process because conditioning is itself a life-long process. Once I realized that I would never reach a magical place where I’d never think or feel or say or do another racist thing again ever, I realized that undoing conditioning is about vigilance, being honest with myself, being patient with myself, and being accountable to other people. It’s not about hating myself, and it’s certainly not about this fantasy that I can become the perfect white person.

I feel like, I don’t know–white supremacy is like having asthma or something. It’s not my fault I have it, and it’s a result of my environment, but I still need to deal with it when it shows up.

What this card has also shown me is that I really haven’t spent enough time working with indigenous people and people of color and envisioning collective liberation to be able to address my fears. And speaking of fear…

How do I hold myself? Rabbit

If Eagle is truth and liberation is Panther, then I’m…Rabbit. In this midst of these big, bold, liberatory forces, I hold myself like a prey species. (Bald Eagles don’t actually eat rabbits, they eat fish, but I’m sure that makes no difference to a rabbit who sees the shadow of an eagle.) Like Rabbit, I’m very good at being alert and being a good listener. In truth, I learned a lot about white privilege by reading anti-racist blogs and forums, watching as white people stuck their feet in it over and over again. I’m really good at learning from other people’s mistakes.

But ultimately, a stance of fear isn’t all that helpful. A lot of aspects of the lived experience of white supremacy have revealed themselves to me over time, but I’ve got to say that one of the most insidious is fear. Fear is what makes people call the water protectors at Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter activists “terrorists.” Fear is what makes banning Muslim refugees seem totally reasonable. It makes people incapable of understanding that, no, the people shooting rubber bullets, tear gas, and water canons at nonviolent protestors are the ones to be afraid of; that the people detaining and subjecting refugees to “extreme vetting” are the ones to be afraid of.

There are also smaller fears that, as a white person, it’s easy to bring into social justice spaces–the fear of being called out, the fear of being rejected, the fear of getting things wrong. In activist spaces, I can very quickly start to orient all of my behavior around these fears. So much so that it’s easy to forget that experiencing and managing these fears is actually not even part of the work. A few months ago I found this great quote by the Black activist Maurice Mitchell on SURJ‘s website that sums it up perfectly: “Your individual anxiety about possibly getting things wrong has nothing to do with my liberation.”

What do I have that can’t be taken away? Sea Serpent

I’m not exactly sure why I felt I needed to ask this question, but I’m glad I did. Kim Krans’s interpretation of the Sea Serpent is about healing and forgiveness.

When the essence of this card is in balance, we express ourselves creatively and sexually without fear or shame. We know what we desire most. Our heart is at ease and our relationships are meaningful and enduring. We loosen the grip of self-judgment, and we let the cool waters of forgiveness in to heal our wounds. (From the guidebook.)

This message is powerful for me because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the second kind of fear I mentioned, of getting things wrong as a white activist. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how white people who want to dismantle white supremacy need, not only psychological/spiritual resources for dealing with fear, but we also need to deliberately undertake a deep practice of self-love.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but I’ve really come to see the truth of this over the years. Without a foundation of love and trust in ourselves, we fall into white guilt. That’s the default mode, actually, because–hey, we’re generally a self-hating culture. (And note: if this white supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy thing were working out for us, we wouldn’t be such an anxious and self-hating culture to begin with.) In my experience, when we fall into white guilt, our unconscious goal isn’t to dismantle white supremacy, but to be liked and forgiven by indigenous people and people of color. To be the good white person. The problem is, though, that this is asking indigenous people and people of color to do the emotional labor of making us feel good about ourselves, which they’ve already been doing against their wills for as long as white supremacy has existed.

So the forgiveness aspect of this card isn’t necessarily about asking others for forgiveness; it’s about having the courage to forgive myself and love myself when I’m afraid, when I mess up, when I encounter yet another nasty or embarrassing layer of conditioning, when I find yet another blind spot.

Once we get into the elemental aspects of these cards, there’s even more to go into, but I’ll stop here. Another question that I have for myself is: why was I able to access these insights so quickly from a deck featuring animals, rather than humans? (Also, there are some questions about this deck and where it may or may not cross the line from cultural exchange into cultural appropriation, but that’s another can of worms for another time.)

On the Collective

It’s not surprising to me that I was in a tarot slump in the months leading up to the election. I was having trouble looking deeply into anything because I was in a state of numbness/denial about the possibility of Trump becoming president. No wonder that I didn’t have a lot of patience for slowing down, sitting with myself, and understanding what was happening inside me. Since the election, however, I’ve been turning inward–and turning toward darkness. I’ve been absorbing a lot of lessons about power, not only the kind of power coming out of the White House right now, but power dynamics between people and in movements, and where power resides in me.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my cards, a lot of time alone in the dark with candle light. I’ve been using Slow Holler pretty much exclusively, although the Animal Spirit oracle by Kim Krans recently came into my life and I have a feeling I will be using it quite frequently for a while. Right now, I’m very interested in the spread of movements and ideas and Slow Holler is perfect because its wisdom is very much focused on the collective, and on seeing individuals as part of collectives. The deck substitutes the Kindred for the Empress, the Guild for the Heirophant, and Intersection for Justice and throughout the guidebook we’re asked to think about how our actions affect the collective, and vice versa. This deck landed on my doorstep when I most needed it, but I couldn’t have known that when I backed it on Kickstarter nearly two years ago.

I have been thinking about the collective a lot, and I have been acting in the collective, too. On January 21st, I went to my local Women’s March, which ended up being 11,000 people strong (about 1/5 my city’s population.) That night, I slept through the night for the first time in months. Just yesterday, I attended a protest against Trump’s Muslim/refugee ban at Detroit Metro Airport with about 7,000 other people. Being an introvert, I feel pretty drained after protests and marches, and have to do some conscious breathing when things get tense, as they did for a minute last night when a Homeland Security cop threw a guy to the ground. But I want to keep going to them because knowing that I’m not alone, that there are thousands of people willing to get out in the street (and in the case of last night’s protest, on less than 24 hours’ notice) with me, and that I’m willing to get out in the street with them, is the best way I know how to avoid feeling powerless.

There is so much to be scared about right now–the ban on Muslims and refugees has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind for the past couple of days, but the gag orders and hiring freezes at the EPA and other government agencies, the re-starting of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, attacks on the Affordable Care Act, are all deeply unsettling. I think what’s most unsettling to me is that Trump is clearly bent on destroying the US government, both as a functioning democracy and an institution that is supposed to support and protect the people. (I’m not saying that the US government actually has been doing these things as it should, but it’s better than Government As Business Making Profit for the Very Few, which Trump clearly wants.) He’s doing this by appointing people to office who want to destroy the agencies they would head.

So what did the two protests I attended actually accomplish? Nothing. Nothing, except that they gave people hope, helped make connections, inspired other people to act in similar ways, normalized our outrage, de-normalized Trump, and said to all of us, very powerfully, that we are not alone.

I have been doing reading and listening, too. Here are a few different voices that have made their way to me through various means, talking about what is being asked of us, and how we can take care of ourselves for the long term.

First, How to #StayOutraged without Losing Your Mind by Mirah Curzer. There’s much good advice here, but for some reason, the following is really, really resonating with me right now:

The movement works as a coalition of people focused on different issues, so don’t let anyone convince you that by focusing your energy on one or two issues, you have effectively sided with the bad guys on everything else. Ignore people who say things like, “you’re not a real feminist if you aren’t working to protect the environment” or “you’re betraying the cause of economic justice if you don’t show up for prison reform.” That’s all nonsense. There is a spectrum of support, and nobody can be everywhere at once.

By the same token, don’t allow yourself to be shamed for being new to the game. Ignore people who tell you that your protests of Trump are hypocritical because you didn’t protest Obama. That’s hogwash for many reasons, but most importantly, YOU ARE HERE NOW AND THAT’S WHAT MATTERS. Do not engage in activist one-upmanship, and don’t allow yourself to be shamed for not being fully briefed and up to date on everything, for not spending your days glued to CSPAN and Twitter, for not making someone else’s number one issue yours as well. That is a demand for emotional labor from you, and you do not have to give it.

I think this is resonating with me because within the resistance community, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise, legitimate critique and dialogue from people tearing each other down because they feel helpless in other venues.

Second is a video that I just found this morning, by Jill Freeman, whose wise voice is emerging beautifully in the YouTube community. One of her main points that I’ve really taken to heart is that bullies like Trump do things very suddenly and quickly because they want to disorient you and see how you react. Jill makes the point that it’s imperative not to freak out right now because this is a test–because if we freak out, this is going to be a sign that our MO is freaking out, and we can be taken advantage of very easily. (She puts it a lot better than I do.)

I don’t feel like either the Women’s March or these airport protests are freakouts–even though the conservative media would like to paint them this way. The words that I’ve heard in these spaces are, “I am not afraid. We are not afraid.” They are messages that if you push us, we’ll push back. I have come away from them feeling stronger, not weaker. But if you are feeling scared and powerless right now, Jill’s video contains much good advice.

Third, a couple of Facebook posts from the author and activist James O’Dea. The first is from the day after the election:

This is not a time to fall into fear or project calamitous consequences for America but it is a time to be very, very vigilant. Vigilance is a state of conscious alertness and full-bore engagement:
Hold a vivid and dynamic vision of collective well-being and a truly positive future.
Act from a place of radical inclusion.
Listen with full-bodied attention to unspoken wounds and to the whispers of indefatigable hope.
Activate the fullest expression of your own morally inspired conscience.
Incarnate and manifest your values down to the finest detail.
Attune to Mother Nature’s gathering voice and speak her language with eloquent clarity
Attest to the power of love and warm its fires by building beloved community.
Put a light in your window to welcome kindred spirits, those afraid of persecution and as a sign that you are always, always open to healing dialogue.

The second is from two days ago:

The death of complacency…the birth of conscious activism

What does it mean to be complacent? Well, you know it will all turn out fine. Let’s not get all hot and bothered: a wrinkle here a wrinkle there doth not the great unraveling make. Right?
Wrong. Dead wrong. On a day when refugees from majority Muslim countries who had visas and undergone full screening were taken off planes and detained at airports we can’t be complacent. Christians were not affected by the ban.

No more shrugs about cutting funding for climate change research; deportations , refugee bans, reviving fossil fuels, supporting torture, coddling dictators etc. If you have been shaken from complacency frenzy is not the answer.
Have a little burial ceremony for our collective complacency then celebrate the birth of truly conscious, visionary and inspired activism.

And, finally, this beautiful meditation on Instagram from Dori Midnight:

Friends, we are magic. Our magic is our power, our resilience, our protection, our way. It’s a rough day, and by day I mean a time outside of time, a dream, a folk tale we are living in in which the shadow beast monster is sitting at the decision making table trying to destroy, imprison, and control our earth body and the magical ones. It’s okay if we lose hope right now, because we are going to move beyond hope. We need more than hope. We need magic, we need all our senses, all our eyes, our plants, stones, songs, dances, poems, ancestral love, hexes, spells, chants- we need to reach deep into our baskets and purses and toolkits and pockets. Deeper than marching, deeper than making calls and writing letters, though those are part of our magic, we need more. We need to dream and vision and hold on to our visions of justice and liberation. We need to take the leap, beyond the structures that no longer serve us, and never did- the police, the government, all the architecture of patriarchy and white supremacy- what is on the other side? Mutual aid, plant medicine, networks of care, kinship, feeding each other, circles of people singing, learning how to prepare our bodies in death, remembering what we know in our bones, talking the way whales talk to each other, listening to what the earth and the ancestors have to say in this moment about how to stay alive, how to stay present, how to work like the tricksters we are. White people, now is the time to do some deep ancestral healing and connecting- get right with your bloodlines and make it right with both magic and real, concrete reparations- give money and put bodies on the line.

In the folktale, the hero/ine always has more than human allies and always outsmarts the asshole with humor, magic, trickery, dance, song, and ancient ways. Let’s remember ours.

Let’s stay together, let’s stay strong. Let us continue to envision what we want as we fight against what we don’t want. I feel surrounded by so many beautiful people with strong spines and open hearts, I feel that we’re beginning to find that within us which is indestructible.

Slow Holler, for healing and waking up

I’ve been messing around with various potential posts for this blog because there are so many things happening inside me that are not getting written down anywhere. My tarot slump has continued, but two things happened yesterday that have rekindled my faith that tarot can help me with the changes that we are facing on Earth right now.

Yesterday morning, I found this post by Siobhan Rene on Little Red Tarot: Face Up Judgement: Trumpets, Grief, and Getting Woke. Siobhan drops some serious wisdom about the Judgement card and its relationship to waking up.

The Judgement card heralds a cycle of sleeping consciousness, its awakening, and resistance to the revelation. Nothing is static. No one arrives and stays woke forever to all things. No one sleeps forever. At least not without a ton of grief. We regularly face opportunities to awaken or resist reality again and again. The direction we move in the cycle depends on our willingness to wake up or our commitment to bury our heads in the sand.

Please go read this beautiful post. It puts so much stuff that I’ve been thinking and feeling lately into an entirely new context. I’m a proponent of the work of Joanna Macy, who points out that the grief we feel for the world–which others may try to privatize and pathologize as personal neurosis–is actually proof that we are inseparable from the world. When we hear the trumpet calling us to awaken from the sleep of distraction and separation, we actually awaken to several things all at once: our love and gratitude for the world, our grief at its destruction, the interconnection of all beings and things, and the need to take action.

As Siobhan points out, we go through cycles of sleep and awakening–it’s not true that we sleep forever or wake up once and for all. Instead, waking up is something that we choose over and over, whether it’s a self-prompted awakening from within, or a trumpet call from without. (And yes, I am deliberately playing on the fact that trump is embedded in trumpet.) In either case, we have a choice to either move toward waking up or to fall back asleep. I’ll also add here that what is usually translated as “enlightenment” or “awakening” in Buddhism is in many schools not seen as a permanent state. Zen in particular, which I study, talks about awakening as a series of experiences both sudden and gradual.

Anyway, I was pondering all of this when a package arrived at my house well after dark. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, the Slow Holler deck!

In some ways, it’s hard to even believe that I now hold this deck in my hands. I wrote my first blog post about it back in March of 2015–over a year and a half ago. The creators ran a great Kickstarter campaign, keeping us all apprised of updates as the deck has progressed, and shipping it out on schedule.

Already, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this deck, but I think it will be a while before I write a review. Let’s just say that, in working with the Slow Holler Tarot, I have felt more supported and healed by the tarot than I have in months. I knew the deck was going to arrive soon and kind of wistfully thought that it might pull me out of my tarot slump, but I did not anticipate that it would be this powerful. The deck is true to its promise of diversity of all kinds, but I think what is making the biggest impression on me now is its orientation toward the collective. The messages behind the Slow Holler Tarot are about sustaining yourself by sustaining others, and vice versa. It’s clearly a deck that has been created by people who know the challenges and rewards of collective action.

It’s time for me to wake up and lean in–to keep waking up and leaning in–and the Slow Holler Tarot has offered itself as a compass.

Quiet friend, who has come so far

It’s been a long, long time, my dears. I did not intend to abandon this blog for four months, but looking at the last post I can see how grief and pain have been catching up with me–as well as alternating feelings of overwhelm and idleness/worthlessness. I’m humbled by the steady stream of people who continue to find their way here, most of them looking for information on the Wooden Tarot. I’m very aware that my Wooden Tarot meanings series stalled out right before I got to the Major Arcana and I still don’t quite know if I’m ready to take it on.

Truthfully: I’ve been in a tarot slump for the past few months. I think a large part of it is that knitting has largely taken the place of tarot as the dominant hobby/daily practice in my life. It used to be that I’d bring my tarot cards down to the breakfast table with me so I could do a daily draw. Now I bring my knitting down to the breakfast table with me and try to get a few rows in first thing. Another reason for my tarot slump is probably that I’ve disengaged from tarot social media in large part because I (finally) quit obsessing about which deck to buy next. I enjoy the tarot social media community, but it really was getting to be too much for me. I became too focused on owning and displaying decks (and looking at other people’s decks) rather than my own practice.

But I think most of all, I’ve really had to pause and assess–given the pain in the world, does it really make a difference if I pull out some cards with pictures on them? Over the past couple of months, although I continue to practice with tarot and oracle cards every few weeks, I’ve at times had a sense of embarrassment over the idea that I own about a dozen tarot and oracle decks and really think they could help out in the face of all the things that are wrong in this world.

Even though I haven’t done a whole lot of direct action either, I’ve been resistant to turning inward in response to the pain of the world. I think that part of this is that a slow, dry, low-key depression has been creeping up on me due to the fact that I still don’t have a job. I really, really don’t want to turn inward because it kind of seems like it’s dying, and the parts that aren’t dead are in a lot of pain. I don’t want to look at that, to sit with that. It’s true that I have come a hell of a long way since my depression four years ago, but I still find myself here: distracted and fidgety, overreacting to every thing I do wrong, wanting someone to give me a job so I can just have something to DO, but utterly resistant to doing a job that I think is boring or meaningless.

Despite talking a good game about meditation and spirituality, I still find myself indulging in distractions, avoiding the present moment, and being harshly self-critical. It’s taken me a long time to own up to this fact.

And then…this. Yesterday was a week since the election, and I am really sick of the word election. Already in my town, which is as blue as Babe the ox, a man threatened to set a woman on fire if she did not remove her hijab, gay and interracial couples have found swastikas scrawled on their doors, and a rock that university students regularly paint had “Kill them all” spray-painted on it. Not that any of this shit is new, it’s just been happening with greater frequency and visibility over the past several months, and even more so since the election.

It’s been fairly difficult for me to function, honestly. And I feel so vulnerable in this pain. Fortunately, I have close friends who are feeling the same way that I do so I’m not completely alone. But it feels so overwhelming at times–not only what is happening to human rights in the United States, but the fact that resisting the fossil fuel industry here has become so, so much harder.

And I just don’t know. I realize that the majority of my fellow white people voted for Trump from a place of privilege. Some (seems like a greater number than the media wants us to think) really were just voting for him because he is a bigot who is going to put white nationalists and ultra-conservatives in power. More, however, were so sick of Hilary Clinton and the Democratic party (I don’t blame them) that they were willing to throw pretty much every marginalized and vulnerable group of people under the bus. They might not have voted out of overt racism, but it’s clear that they cared more about their personal finances than justice or human rights.

But–I can’t say I’m much better. I voted for human and Earth rights in this country, all while throwing people in Syria and elsewhere under the bus, so I can’t speak from a position of moral authority here. I did not want another neoliberal war-hawk Democrat in the White House, so I did nothing about the election aside from voting, not a single Facebook post. I didn’t even do anything for Bernie Sanders because, although he and I agree on most issues, I thought he was too far left to have a chance against Trump. Now I see that he was maybe our only chance against Trump.

Over the past week, my feelings have yo-yo-ed quite a bit, from grief and despair, to determination and even gratitude. I am grateful for this wake-up call from complacency, for the shadow of my country being brought to light. I’m grateful that the depression I was feeling about my personal problems seems to have evaporated for now (although the prospect of facing them still seems exhausting.) I’m grateful that in these times I have really found my people. I find myself reaching for connection, rather than retreating into isolation (which is my usual tendency when feeling pain.)

I don’t have any real tarot wisdom except this: We say that the Star follows the Tower as if they were two distinct developmental stages. But I say that the Star is in the Tower, and the Tower is in the Star. They continually make and re-make each other. In disaster we are called to great things.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself into wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Signal Boost: Tarot, Spirituality, #BLACKLIVESMATTER

This post started out as a signal boost for Virginia Rosenberg’s article, but I’m actually just going to add some more stuff because I found some more stuff that needs to be added. The last 4 or 5 days have broken up a lot of encrusted structures in my mind about privilege, whiteness, and white guilt. On Thursday, I bought the book Radical Dharma after hearing about the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile because I didn’t know what to do with my broken heart. Then my heart broke in a different way on Friday morning when I heard about the shooting in Dallas. I wrote a little about all this on my other blog and also began to use tarot to interrogate whiteness, which was heartbreaking in yet another way. I want to write up the results of that reading (hopefully ongoing practice) but for now, here are the words of others.

7 Question for Earnest Allies

by Siobhan of Siobhan’s Mirror

Thank you, thank you Siobhan for this gift.

Use the questions below to journal. Use them as a tarot spread. Use them as a conversation starter but make sure your conversation partner has the energy or interest in engaging these kinds of questions. Use these questions to know yourself better. Use them how you will. Or don’t and save them for later. Take a healing bath instead. May your inquiry be led by love. Even when it burns white hot and lives in you as anger. May your inquiry be a prayer for hope or a precursor for action. May your own truth lead you.

Where does a healer’s anger go? Beyond love and light

by Asali of Asali Earthwork

I could ask you to show me where in space and time it is written that there is love, light, and goodness in the murder of a man in front of his family, but I won’t. I could ask you to show me where in the stars is the hope when Black trans women are killed for daring to live. I could ask you to show me where on the dirt we walk on is the reason for Black femmes and mothers heartbreak and dying. I’ll say this instead.

Your silence is complicit in my murder.

That you remain silent while claiming the identity of healer in any form only makes it worse. That I am asked as a healer to remain silent about my pain is unacceptable and is killing me.

Converting Hidden Spiritual Racism into Sacred Activism: An Open Letter to Spiritual White Folks

by Virginia Rosenberg

Emphasizing “positive vibrations” versus “negative emotions” is another way of perpetuating oppression through distancing yourself.
Beware of giving advice that stems from fear. Telling others to “be the light” when they are experiencing intense emotional reactions is destabilizing and promotes falsehood and confusion. Manipulating the feelings of others is psychologically and emotionally damaging.
This type of advice robs us of personal inner sovereignty. It removes us from an authentic relationship with our inborn navigation system and prevents healing. It also renders us ineffective to deal with reality and contribute to healthy change.

What Asali and Virginia are addressing is a tendency prevalent in many spiritual communities to avoid discussing violence, oppression, and privilege because those topics are “low vibe” (the New Age way of putting it) or signify anger and attachment (the Buddhist way of putting it.) White folks need to realize that the option of not discussing these things is itself a privilege. Furthermore, shutting people down by telling them that they are too attached, angry, or low vibe in reaction to violence and oppression is nothing other than spiritual bypass at the community level and creates toxic communities. It’s a way of pathologizing our pain for the world.

If we are all interconnected–which most spiritual communities believe–and there is pain and injustice happening somewhere in the world, we will feel pain and that pain itself is a sign of our interconnection. (See Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects for more on this.) Let’s honor our pain, feel it fully, and let it move us to action.