Happy Juneteenth. ❤️🙏
to my White family:
How do we stick around, stay present, continue to face the hard, embarrassing, awkward stuff in ourselves and our beloved Community when things get so painful that having feelings sometimes means that it hurts to think?
When it’s so incredibly important to have non-reactive, listening presence?
I want to hear your best strategies.
for me: Hugs help.
But during a pandemic aren’t the best idea.
Maybe leaning in and embracing “What Is” is the hug that we need.
This past week, prior to a powerful healing session, my nervous system felt inflamed, consumed by the battle between Myself (that I recognize as Self)
and Myself (that I recognize as Other).
(How might a hug look between these two?)
After the healing session,
a deep and soul-quenching dive, hours later,
I gradually drifted back to the surface with a lot more resource,
aware that this is an epically long game but at the same time,
RIGHT NOW is such a powerful opportunity for our Collective to make a shift.
(what would things look like if everyone had access to such deep healing?)
Embracing “What is”:
One of the places I’ve been coming face to face with,
and needing to embrace with full wholehearted willingness to see it and change:
My complacency in the face of KNOWING that the lifestyle I’m living has deleterious effects on the environment and those Humans who live closest/least insulated from the damage being done to our living-and-clearly-communicating-Home.
Which means, first, Brown and Black people.
But if no considerable and appropriate action is taken,
then it continues on
to the grand-
and great-grand-
and great great grand –
(etc.) children I would so love to be a good ancestor for.
Big Breath.
I didn’t choose the trauma of being colonized so many generations back that I can’t feel my ancestral roots except through layers of scar tissue.
But it is my responsibility to do everything I can to heal and to address the patterns of racism in whatever ways I can find or co-create, to try to send my descendants my care, that they have good lives.
And I didn’t choose to make a society that is so devastatingly parasitic to the life support systems all depend upon.
but it is my responsibility to find ways to change and make amends.
And of course the brain and the body freezes on the question “HOW”?
Right now it feels like the biggest thing I can do is work on un-freezing the brain.
so any action I take isn’t coming from unconscious reactivity which is what created all this shit anyway.
I’ve been really appreciating modalities like Core Transformation
(which feels like another “hug”, with the intense frozen negativity being embraced with greatest love, and in the process, becoming fluid and beneficially re-integrating with the whole).
Another “COVID-Safe Hug” that I am coming to see as an absolute necessity:
Meditation.
And meditative activities. Like music, making art, being in the woods, lying down on the Earth.
doing whatever is necessary to help the busy traffic of my brain to at least pause
and allow Stillness to come through
bathing, soothing the nervous system
bringing Presence where it is most sorely needed
to the daily living
and to the work that must be done
to help shift paradigms within and without.
so the war within isn’t creating more conflict and disruption outside of myself
than is already burning in the Field.
And who knows, maybe if those quantum-field-thinking goofballs (like me) are on to something, the work we do within will impact the work we engage “out there” (whatever “out there” means).
Sky
(Song by Trina, based on a quote by Pema Chödrön. Used with permission.)
Capo on 2nd fret
A
Lean
Dm
into the pain that rises
A
Breathe
Dm
follow the way it leads you
A
Now
Dm
into a place you never thought you’d choose
E
to go
A
Stay
Dm
I know you’re good at leaving
A
but the Cost
Dm
is getting much higher
A
than you can pay.
E
But you know the way
Gm. A
Cause you are the Sky
Gm A
Open and wide
Gm A
You are the Sky
Dm
Everything else
A
is the weather.
Lean
into whatever rises
Breathe
follow the way it leads you
Now
into a place you never
knew that you
could go
Stay
right here in this present moment
come Awake
to the Light that shines
beyond time
and Space
cause you are the Light
Radiant, Bright
yes you are the Light
everything else is the weather
everything else . . .
it’s just the weather.
© 2019 Trina Brunk
