Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 78
I wake from a dream in which I’m exhausted. In the dream I’m in child’s pose with my cheek pressed up against the earth and I can’t move. All I can do is rock back and forth and hug my knees to my chest and feel into how exhausted I am.
Being on lockdown during a global pandemic thousands of miles from home while my country reckons with the karma of 400 years of systemic racism against Black people is really tiring.
Over my morning coffee I breathe into my belly and sense fear there. And helplessness. As I keep breathing I become aware of my heart and the deep, tender ache quivering at its centre.
If this is how it feels for me, a queer, light-skinned Latinx raised upper-middle class, private school educated, carrying with me the privilege of my ancestors, benefiting from the oppression they perpetrated against those less fortunate than themselves, then I can’t even begin to imagine what today must feel like for my Black friends and neighbours.
I’ve been listening deeply to myself, and then the world, and then my Black friends, and Black teachers, and Black poets, and writers, and healers and leaders of now and those who came before. And what I hear over and over and over again is a plea and a prayer.
A plea that those of us with white privilege wake up. Wake up to what we’ve benefited from and continue to benefit from. Wake up to the fact that it is not our work to save anyone, it is our work to feel deeply into the discomfort of now.
A prayer that together we can find a way to build a better world. A prayer that white folks find the courage it takes to search deeply inside themselves, speak with radical honesty about their shadow-side, challenge with conviction friends and family who are still in slumber, and keep digging deeper to find the strength and humility to face their own hypocrisy.
No one is innocent and complacency is just the wolf of resistance in sheep’s clothing.
I’ve been thinking about this moment. It can feel like an assault on our already sensitive souls on the back and in the midst of coronavirus. But to me I see a more catalytic dynamic.
I think coronavirus ripped us open in all the right ways and has prepared us for this moment.
We had to stop. We had to put down the weight of our distracted lives. The unending consumption and busy-ness and “this-is-me-doing-me” self-centeredness.
We were under the spell of the inane news cycle, and celebrities doing stupid shit, and the latest trend, and the absurdity of Trump coupled with a perverse compulsion, even obsession, with how bad he is and what will he do next and how bad can this get?
Coronavirus forced us to admit to our deep interconnectedness, the fact that our lives are literally in each other’s hands. We had to face our own mortality and the vulnerability of our Black and Brown neighbours, essential workers who just weeks before the lockdown were being told they didn’t matter, didn’t even belong here in the UK because they weren’t “skilled.”
Everything that’s wrong with our world was laid bare. Coronavirus exposed the dark underbelly of our capitalist, neo-liberal, patriarchal, racist world, held up a mirror and showed us who we have become.
To those who have been struggling for too long, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I still haven’t done enough of the heavy lifting in my own damn heart to feel into how I can show up more fully in this world beside you, with you.
I have believed, and continue to believe, that dharma can change the world. That by changing our own minds, we change the world. And I’ve been working hard on my own mind and heart, and helping others to do the same.
But I have not yet made explicit, as explicit as I could, the connections between individual freedom from suffering and collective liberation from all forms of oppression.
I have not yet looked deeply enough into my own conditioning to find the seeds, the same seeds, that have sown hatred and violence in this world for so long, too long.
The other thing that happen today is that we went to the park. And in the park I found medicine. There were people drumming and singing and dancing and I listened deeply to their song.
And in that song I heard sorrow and devotion and humility and grace. And in that song I let myself hear the whisper of my own humanity asking me what now, what now.
I feel done. Whatever was holding me back before is no longer blocking the road ahead. I feel done with my own shame and doubt. My own sense of helplessness and inertia.
This is what I teach. And what I practice. Now is the time to sit with my own discomfort long enough to let my broken heart crack completely open, allow whatever lies dormant there to be unleashed on this world, in all its fury and all its beauty.
I cannot know what will come of such a witnessing, such a burning myself up from the inside. But whatever it is I trust that it will be a more authentic, more real, more human manifestation than what’s come before.