That is how we elevate
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I believe that we, human beings, are one organism that is evolving. As such, I believe that each and every one of us are playing a role in shaping what we become as that organism.
The things our systems currently value fall under what we’ve categorized as, or have decided are, “masculine” traits and behaviors. We all know what these are: linear thinking and processing, language, maths and sciences, time-based processes like goal-setting, manifesting for the future, assertiveness or aggression, domination, control, division, hierarchies, etc. Basically, characteristics that most militaries espouse.
As a society, we are living according to very militaristic rules, where things are punitive, top-down, body-whipping, emotion-controlling, victim-blaming. Where compassion is for sissies. Vulnerability is weakness and should be eradicated. Spirituality rooted in nature and natural laws and rhythms (i.e. the certain truth that mothers are the gates to all of life, ever, forever, and everywhere) is, at best, considered woo-woo or hippie-dippie, and at worse, it’s witchcraft, heresy, sacrilege, and punishable or shamed.
The categories we have created are arbitrary and just that—created, most usually by men. They don’t naturally exist. In nature, everything is in shades and hues, with one thing gradually blending into the next. Nothing is absolute. Nature doesn’t produce “product” 24/7. No living thing can. Nature has seasons, ups and downs, times of great movement, and times of deep rest.
What we have created is not sustainable, and the signs that this is the case are everywhere. Not only are we interdependent, we are one thing. We are one spinning ball in the twinkling darkness, and even if some of us fly off to Mars to start again, we will bring with us the scars and trauma we think we are leaving behind. Because wherever you go, there you are.
Leaving a place doesn’t take away the pain you felt in that place – that pain lives in the body and you take it with you wherever you go. Leaving a relationship doesn’t take away what led you to that relationship in the first place. Stonewalling only leads to isolating yourself within thick cement confines of walls you’ve erected. You cannot run away from yourself.
The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, taught us that “What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
We must incorporate our past, our pain, our trauma.
Incorporate = in (late Latin, meaning “into”) + corpare (Latin, meaning “to form into a body).
We must take the energy of our emotions and digest it into knowledge and/or wisdom that we can carry with us to the next level in our evolution.
If we avoid emotions we don’t like — for most of us those are usually pain, anger, and fear — then there’s no opportunity to incorporate them.
The Feeling Wheel shows other iterations of some of the “big” feelings: pain can also be sadness, grief, and loneliness; anger includes frustration, annoyance, irritation; and fear includes things like anxiety, panic, and nervousness.
This doesn’t mean you’re a failure if you don’t feel all of your feelings all of the time, of course. But cultivating a self-awareness that allows you to acknowledge when you are avoiding something is an important first step in integrating that hard emotion.
Basically, in order to incorporate our experiences, we have to digest our emotions. *We have to process and integrate our feelings so they can become the wisdom of our bodies.
That is how we elevate and evolve.
Our current culture does not encourage us to do this work. We have many pretty, pleasurable, and distracting ways to avoid our feelings: TV shows, movies, video games, food, shopping, work, travel, just to name a few.
We have addictions, whether with a capital ‘A’ or a small ‘a’. Capital ‘A’ addictions are the ones we always hear about, such as alcoholism and drug addiction. But all addictions are about numbing or soothing emotional and spiritual pain. They are compulsions set in motion as soon as certain sensations are triggered in our bodies that remind us of unwanted or unbearable pain. Addictions act as bandages on wide, gaping, open wounds. An addiction’s basically a compulsion. It’s when you reach for something immediately because there’s hurt, or there’s something unbearable. It’s when you immediately reach, as if you were grasping for a life saver.
But we are all addicted (small ‘a’) to something. For me, it is control and competence. I have to stay on top of everything for fear of my survival and the survival of my children. If I look back at my life, I have always been okay. But a voice inside my head says, “You have always been okay because you are competent and have stayed on top of everything.”
And that is very likely true, because in my world, it is very easy for single mothers, especially from BIPOC communities, to end up homeless with their children. I was at the doorstep of possible homelessness in 2015, so I know that many of us are one phone call, one decision, one paycheck away from these things. And we live in a society that is constantly reminding us of this, and also reminding us that it is our fault if that’s where we end up. That it was something we did or didn’t do, were too much of or not enough of. That we are, essentially, to blame for whatever disaster we find ourselves in and the systems at large, that we all exist within, are invisible—they have nothing to do with our personal lives.
This is, obviously, a lie.
So, of course we are addicted to many things. Of course we need soothing and numbing. We live in a world that has no time for pain or fear. Remember the military: you have to buck up and go to war. There is no room in the trenches for people who are afraid. People who are afraid will die — and get everyone else killed in the process.
You have to be a man, goddammit, and “real” men have no time for fear or vulnerability. “Real men” make fear submit to them.
How is this not madness? How can you cut off a full fifty percent of yourself and continue to call yourself alive?
Wars are not necessary. I know, in our world today, this might seem like a very radical concept, but wars are always over land and resources, or some outside “other” that we have decided is the enemy. There is enough for every single person on the planet if we shared the wealth. If European nations didn’t scrape all the resources from the global south (and their neighbors, in cases like England with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), and if they, instead, collaborated and cooperated, we could, perhaps, live more peacefully. But collaboration and cooperation are considered “feminine” traits akin to socialism or communism, while individualism, domination, and hierarchies are favored in our current systems.
“Co” is Latin for together and “laborare” or “operari” are Latin for to work. If we worked together, as a unit, as an integrated and unified whole, rather than dominating, alienating, isolating, decimating, we might find that the world is not really a frightening place, after all. When everyone is safe, fed, healthy, able to live and love freely, there is little need for violence.
If people recognized the same humanity in others that they see in themselves, and the Life Force in all living beings, there would be less man-made destruction.
But that would involve examining our own Fear and fears. The capital F fear of our own annihilation, i.e. a fear of dying, which stems from the lack of belief in something other than what we can see with our limited human body, and the smaller f fears like the fear of disapproval, not belonging, being alone for the rest of your life (which all really trace back to the big F fear).
That big F fear comes from not believing that there is far more in this human experience than what we can see and hear and smell and feel. That the invisible is far more powerful than the visible. That emotions are simply energy and information meant to shape you and nudge you toward evolution — if only you would stop being afraid of them, stop resisting them, and allow them to become part of your new DNA. If only you would incorporate them as wisdom in your body.
This would involve a belief in the power of the invisible: emotions, energy, intuition, the holy spirit (not in capitals because I’m not referring to the religious concept) or the Life Force…which are all the realm of the feminine. Actually, not just the feminine, but the matriarchal – the Divine Mother.
I believe we once knew this, and we are heading again toward that balance.
We went from knowing that all of life emerges from mothers, to changing the narrative so that all of life was created by a single father-god in heaven. The oldest statues I saw in churches in Spain were almost all of Mary as the Divine Mother, or female saints. But in the most ancient Throne of Wisdom statues, the Mother, alone, held the fruit of life, usually symbolized by a pomegranate or apple. In other iterations, the fruit was transferred to the hand of the small boy-child on her lap, and then, eventually, the creation of life rested solely in the hands of a father-god.
Curiously, the very human Joseph is nowhere in this iconography. We have a virgin-mother (sometimes we have Mary Magdalene, depicted as a prostitute), a son-god, and a father-god. There is no human (in other words, a feeling, vulnerable, imperfect) man option in the imagery.
Some of the earliest archeological sites in the world contain numerous statues and figurines of women, whether pregnant or dancing or simply being, and a few depictions of phalluses or male figures. And even still, they most likely don’t represent literal men and women, but the masculine and feminine principles of creation and manifestation.
Almost all early temples have structures in circular patterns or configurations, resembling wombs. Many early initiation sites have womb-like elements in what is believed to be rituals.
Being in the womb is the earliest experience of our bodies. Every single one of us has that memory encoded in our DNA.
This has nothing to do with being a man or a woman. It has nothing to do with feminism. It is not about politics or nations. And yet it is about all of those things because they are extensions of our thoughts, behaviors, decisions, and systems.
Primarily, this is about the evolving human organism we are, masculine and feminine, dark and light, vulnerable and invincible, indivisible and whole. We are many parts…and one at the same time.
If we can incorporate all of the parts of ourselves we don’t like, the parts we are terrified of, the parts that grieve or that we are angry with, into our bodies through allowing, digesting, and metabolizing, rather than rejecting, hating, and trying to annihilate, or “whip” our bodies into shape, maybe we can figure out a way to create that heaven on earth we all desperately long for.
I wish for you, in the light of this new moon, to explore your inner self. To begin to understand the language of your emotions and how your body communicates those to you, so that all of your parts within this system that operates in the world as you, can operate together, as a whole unit where each part is welcomed, included, valued, and fully integrated.