9 
It’s All About Relationship
The Relational
In this part of the book, our focus is on decolonizing our magicks and finding our way into the relational possibilities of this new wave of radical revisioning. We come to the roots and work them together. We deconstruct and reconstruct and find our way into the not knowing that allows the deeper knowing, the collective knowing, to emerge.
In much of Part 2, we will not be focused so much on her five faces as much as we will be focused on seeing each other’s faces, and our own faces, and the awareness that she is arising with us, within us, around us. She is arising as us. In you, in me, in the we that we are together.
We will be exploring topics of relationality, liberation, collectivism, self-reflection, and magick. We will be tearing apart and sewing back together. We will be entering into relationship with the land where we stand.
The goddess comes back around to us at the end of this section; we will take all that we have learned and create rituals to her in a new way, using new terms, new tools, new ways. That may be the Old Ways. If they are or are not the traditions that were handed down, or the ones that stand unrevealed, hidden in the shadows of time, these ways we are creating now will someday be the Old Ways. In this moment, in these choices, in this process we are dreaming into the future as it exists, nascent and burgeoning, in the now.
We do our part by moving the wheel a turn with as much consciousness as we can draw upon.
Collective Liberation and Personal Responsibility
Many teachers, spiritual guides, and authors have probably told you that your spiritual responsibility begins and ends with doing your own work; that examining your own process, working on yourself, defining and discerning your own bullshit ideologies and beliefs, and addressing them in your own heart and mind is not only enough, but that it is really all you can do to change the world.
In the relational context, I invite you to examine whether this belief sits well in you. Imagine that this highly individualist, self-focused approach were not how we walk into our process of spiritual growth. What if our spiritual realities, beliefs, and ethics contextualized us into spherical, whole-systems, relational structures? What if your liberation and my liberation were truly experienced and understood as a connected, co-arising state? What if the sovereign rights of earth, water, and nature were part of that co-arising? What if the liberation of all were the liberation of one, and the liberation of one was the liberation of all?
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
—Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s
Yes, our process of liberation begins in our own hearts and minds. Decolonization of our magicks and imaginations and bodies are reliant upon precise, incisive, ongoing self-examination. But in this new aeon standing in the soil of atavistic, nascent, and living Indigenous traditions, and in the rooting and budding and blossoming new traditions, in stardust and grit magicks, this one that calls for guidance from the eternal forces of nature and of the green spark of incipient awareness, we step into alignment with the force of the combined power of our relational liberation.
To think we are each responsible only for our own spiritual well-being is like thinking that making sure your own family has food on the table is enough; what about other hungry families? Is making sure they also have food to eat part of your concern? Are the needs of hungry mamas and babies next door, across town, or on the other side of the planet part of your personal sense of well-being? If not, then perhaps we are not ready for this undertaking. If we are not ready to create relational, rhizomatic connections between our own hearts and the hearts of others, between our own minds and bellies and spirits, and the minds and bellies and spirits of others then perhaps we are not ready to engage in this process of deconstruction and reconstruction and the work of dreaming the new dream and living into it.
Yet perhaps in this moment you are struggling and all you can focus on is the food your family needs. When this is the case in the world we are creating, in the world we are dreaming and breathing and becoming into existence, when you are in need, sisters will come and ask you, “Do you have enough to eat?” They will ask, “Do you have a place to sleep, a place to stand, a place to dance, a place to play, a place to pray in safety?” And they will hold the protective circle so you can make your prayers to your own gods and goddesses in your own way, because we are different from one another, and our differences make us stronger.
An integrated spiritual life exists in the realm of our lived experiences. In the realm of our lived experiences we are coming into the perhaps ancient awareness that we can pool our resources and that when we do, the resources serve more of us, and serve us for longer. We are beginning to know that our shared lack can become our comparable shared wealth. In the process, sharing will bring us closer together.
Yes, your spiritual responsibility begins with your process. But in the context of collective liberation, an integrated spirituality does not end in navel gazing or even in continued pursuit of spiritual materialism. The systems of belief mirrored by the dominant paradigm offer us plenty of opportunity to dive headlong into the self-absorbed blindness of spiritual introspection.
It is a privilege to have the time to pursue spiritual development, especially in the way we think of it in the Western, intellectual, dominant consciousness. In this dominant consciousness, spirituality is the provenance of those who can walk away from their “distractions” and commit to a deeper spiritual calling: the beatniks, sadhus, gurus, and priests. As masculine existence is held as the standard, our woman traditions of finding spirit in the flesh has been framed as a “low” magick. This is all right. We don’t mind our feet and hands and asses in the mud. We are digging the roots that will tell us stories of how we came to be. We are shaping clay into serving plates and water jugs. We are birthing babies and worlds from the sacred openings in our bodies. We are pouring out stories and songs and chants of death and of creation.
This spirituality, this magick, this worship is rooted in the grit, grime, and grace of it all: the blood and laughter of it; the chop-wood-carry-water of it; the reaching and offering of a hand to hold or grab; the grasping at straws; the cooking-for-more-than-your-own-because-you-have-more-than-enough of it; the “I can’t do it alone because I don’t know what I don’t know and I need you” as well as the “I got you” of it. It is new eyes looking and new ears hearing it.
Your well-being is my well-being in this world we are creating. My well-being and your well-being are the same. I am weighted down in your suffering. In your liberation I am lifted up.
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JOURNAL: Where does your responsibility begin and end? Give yourself some concrete examples. |
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ACTION: Where might begin the process of increasing space for our shared liberation? What action would you take based in the realization that your liberation is bound up in the liberation of your sisters? Work on something that increases the possibility of liberation for all beings. |
Intention is Not Everything
Not all things are mutable. As it is sold to millions, the law of attraction is a slick package designed to make those with enough resources to simply attract more resources into the picture not feel guilty—or more importantly, not feel responsible—when others with less privilege are not able to do the same.
We do not “create reality” in a vacuum; we affect one another. Our choices interact with the needs and desires of others. We exist in a system of complex inter-reactions. Not all resources are unlimited. Not all things are accessible to all people.
Intention is an ill-formed concept. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the adage goes. Intention without action is worth little; without engaged action even magickal intention falls short. And, one’s intentions may be good and still have harmful repercussions.
One of the presuppositions that create the foundation of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques is the notion that the “meaning of your communication is the response it receives.” For a long time the core meaning of that presupposition eluded me. It clicked for me when I applied it to communication with my kids: with my little ones it was easy to see that if they weren’t getting what I saying, the best solution was to say it differently; to speak to them where they were.
When we feel into it or think back to an argument we might have had, most of us can see that “I didn’t mean it the way you’re taking it!” is not an apology. When we feel harmed what we want to hear is more like, “I didn’t realize how my actions (or words) would harm you. I didn’t intend that harm. I see that was the outcome and I’m sorry. I won’t do it that way again. I want you to know that I care for you, and I will shift my awareness in order to embrace the way you experience it too.”
A relevant question to ask yourself is this: where do your actions land in consensus reality? How will the outcomes of your intentions and actions affect others? How will they affect other marginalized groups? How will they affect your children? Your future self?
Yes, you can—and automatically do, to some extent—create your reality. Depending upon location and resource availability and opportunity you may choose to create the most amazing reality you can imagine. But without awareness of how your actions affect those around you, you might be creating that reality at the expense of others. Without thinking and feeling through the possible consequences of your intentions, your intentions may bear fruit that is not merely neutral but actually harmful.
We affect one another. And we are affected by one another. Our realities interact and become a larger, shared reality.
The values of the dominant culture tell us that self-involvement and self-investment are the pinnacles of development; rhetoric around self-improvement reflects this. Rhetoric around “limiting beliefs” reinforces it. The mentality behind not talking about, reading, doing, or paying attention to whatever we don’t like reinforces it. A dedication to radical self-expression before intersectional awareness forms, informs, and reiterates it.
Regardless of intention, it is time to listen if feedback tells you that your actions have injured another. It is time to allow the pain, the tears, the anger, the frustration to take the space it needs. This is necessary. This is the work of transformation. This is alchemy.
When intention is being used as a magickal tool, it is of utmost importance that the whole be taken into account to whatever extent is possible. And as we find our edges on what parts we are willing to extend our concern toward, stay there and breathe into it. And then when you are able to, expand your attention even further.
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JOURNAL: Write about a time when your intention landed in a way that caused injury in some way. How did you react? What did you learn from the experience? |
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ACTION: Tell someone about the story you just wrote down. Have a conversation about intention and consensus reality. |
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When coaching clients, one of the techniques I use is an ecology check. This technique can be applied when you want to get a feel for what your intentions might bear when put into action. To perform an ecology check: |
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The Dangers of a Subtle Sense of Spiritual Superiority
Even in a subtle context there is potential harm in the ideologies of intention as the means and ends; when we believe that anything is possible and it is merely the state of mind that drives and draws what we live, we are a hair’s breadth from blaming those who are poor, hungry, ill, homeless, jobless, beaten, or oppressed for their circumstances. We cannot live in the “believe it and it shall be so” and “everything happens for a reason” bubble without casting some blame on those whose cultures are being constricted, starved, contaminated instead of looking at the real perpetrators of the desecration. And yes, many of us are that; many of us are to one extent or another perpetrators.
We cannot make ideologies and structures of belief that are held collectively go away just by a solitary act of deciding not to believe in a thing. We exist in a reality generated together by all of us, and shift needs to happen in the consensus reality in order for a thing to truly cease to be, or come into being.
When one is in a position that allows them to ignore consensus reality, they are almost undoubtedly in a position of comparable privilege. And when that person uses their privileged life as an example of how it is possible to simply make it so, to “believe and receive,” it is impossible for that person—and for any who support ungrounded prosperity theologies—not to judge and belittle the plight of others who have less access to resources.
Racism could be seen as a “limiting belief,” but it’s not one held solely (or even primarily) by those it harms the most; it is a systemic belief that has systemic ramifications. One may choose to not believe in racism or may consider themselves “color blind,” but that obviously doesn’t mean that racism is magically no longer an issue. As much as the well-meaning folks who believe that we live in a post-racial society would like it to, not believing in racism doesn’t make racism go away. In fact, it does the opposite. When a white person tells a Person of Color that they don’t see color, that white person is denying the Person of Color’s lived experience.
When we choose to turn away from the truth of a person’s existence we deny their personhood. We deny their sovereignty. We deny their souls. We must examine our complicity. If we are not actively lifting one another up, chances are we are unconsciously holding one another down. The system was built this way; when we fight for the crumbs we all go hungry.
We will win our freedom by feeding each other. Imagining that everything happens for a reason allows us to wash our hands of elements of influence we could perhaps have if we cared enough, or felt empowered enough, to try. Instead, “white-lighting” can get the best of our spiritual processes and we can end up allowing our sense of some “divine right” to move us into apathy and a lack of care.
Intention as ideology also primes our consciousness for spiritual bypassing. Many of us are familiar with the fallout of white-light spiritual bypassing. It usually goes something like this: “If this horrible thing is happening for a reason, I don’t need to feel the enormity of it. So everything happens for a reason” or “Your thoughts are bringing in the negative. Shift your consciousness! If you didn’t focus on racism (sexism, poverty, etc.) it would cease to be an issue. Your negative thoughts are part of the problem,” or “Your anger isn’t serving you.”
Even the most noble of paths’ lineages and ideologies may be used to justify staying in the spiritual comfort zone. The “everything is perfect just as it is, because it is as it is,” mantra leaves little room for looking at ways we can create a more integrated and compassionate reality.
In many cases spiritual shaming is used to justify tone policing when issues that are core and challenging and heated come forward. When bringing up a difficult topic, you and I have probably both been told—maybe more than once—that what we are saying is too much or that we are saying it in a way that makes it too hard to hear. We are told we’re too angry, too intense, too confrontational, or too out of control. You have been told to take up less room, be nicer, more polite, less angry. You have been told to wait your turn—and then your turn never comes. You have been told not to be disruptive. Whether these things have been said out loud or simply inferred, you have received these messages. Even if your parents and community members didn’t say it, the dominant culture did. You saw it modeled and reinforced in media, in social interactions, in education, in the work place.
Unfortunately, we have carried that same judgment forward. Each of us has felt discomfort when someone brings up a subject that makes us unsure about things. We have probably asked sisters to tone it down so as not to piss anyone off. We have probably even thought and felt that this was for their benefit.
Returning to intersectionality, it is essential to recognize that silencing doesn’t happen equally: the opinions of Women of Color are too often seen as unimportant. When Women of Color do speak up, they are often hypervisible—told they are too angry or too loud. And it is not even only when Black women are angry that they are told to decrease their visibility. True story: in August of 2015 as I write this book, a story is being shared about a group of Black women being kicked off a tourist excursion called a wine train here in California … for laughing on their book club outing. The women were met in Napa Valley by a police presence. The hashtag #laughingwhileblack is trending.
If the question is “aren’t there more important things than this topic?” I can emphatically say no, there is nothing more important than the right of Black women to laugh in public. Perhaps there are things equally important, but nothing is more important. For their part, People of Color are used to being asked the question of importance. Native American people are asked: “Aren’t land rights a more important issue than the names of sports teams or the use of war bonnets as costumes?” Black feminists are asked: “Isn’t access to health care more important than cultural appropriation?”
If you are not from the culture that’s raising an issue of concern, how would you know what’s most important? And why should one topic be addressed to the exclusion of all others? It is likely (catch the sarcasm?) that all the issues that are being brought up matter. Why else would they be brought up?
Feminism has a horrible track record of centering the needs of the dominant agenda and pushing the needs and desires of marginalized groups out of view.
Silencing others when they have a challenging story to share is not a benefit to anyone. More often than anything we silence others not out of concern for them, but out of fear of facing discomfort. Silencing the conversation when difficult things arise is just another way that we keep one another down. And when we silence each other, we are stuffing our own voices too. With every story that we ask not be told, we are making the world less safe for all of us.
We all probably also know how it feels to be the one to speak up with an unpopular point of view. We know the rattling heart, shaking hands, dry mouth of it. We know the sweaty palms and queasy stomach of it. We know the fight, flight, or freeze of it. And still when the moment comes to support or to silence, many of us often opt for enforcement through tone policing, lateral aggression, finger pointing. We have been trained to this. It is time to break the conditioning.
The truth is that when hard truths are told, there is no easy way to do it. And it is not your responsibility to make sure that no one feels uncomfortable when you need to tell a difficult truth. In these times your only responsibility is to stay with your truth. The hard issues need to be addressed, felt, held, and heard. We need to stand beside one another and around one another and hold space sacred for the telling of hard stories; the speaking of difficult words; the sharing of hurt, anger, and fear.
In this space we allow the cleansing fire to burn us clean. Beneath the embers under the soil lies the newly waking seeds.
The solutions will only arise when we can all talk and feel and push and pull and fight and cry and eventually come to terms with it all. We will then be able to form a collective awareness. At that point we may begin seeking into collective solutions, agreements, compacts, conscious and magickal conspiracies.
We need every bit of our personal and collective language and presence and imaginations to be unlocked and potentially available in this dance we are doing toward our collective liberation.
As it stands, the beliefs that hold us away from our anger, fear, shame, and the deep knowing of it all are also cutting us off from our power. Our anger and pleasure and passion are a birthright. Our revolution song is our life song, the song we were born singing. It is that first glorious gasp, or cry, or moan of the first exhalation after the first inhalation. It is the furious dancing heartbeat that brought us into the world.
Our responsibility is our privilege, and our privilege is our responsibility. The occult parts of our minds and spirits and beings are a wellspring of divine desire and transformation.
Face the hidden parts. Communicate with them. Learn from them. And in a conscious and integrated way, take action on your best intentions for the liberation of all.
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JOURNAL: What areas of emotion have you cut yourself off from? What areas have you discouraged others from exploring because of your own limitations of thought? |
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ACTION: Take a good intention, look at the possible implications, and once you have discerned as well as you can the possible impact of the intention in shared reality, and take right action. |
Finding Ourselves at the Center
The dominant paradigm places a lot of stock in ideas of self-sufficiency, independence, and self awareness. It does not place a high premium on the relational, the nonlinear, the fluid and facile.
In our communities, we know that coming together and offering helping hands and listening ears and loving hearts means more love, more joy, and more shoulders to bear the weight of the heavier times.
We don’t need to go it alone; it’s all right—healthy and good—to seek interaction. Our lives and dreams are nourished and take on new form when we seek out the company of our people. Our woman-story tells us this, and our ways of interacting in shared space echo it, and our very guts know that we need each other’s support. And that we need to support one another as part of that reciprocity.
In 2007 I spent time in Palestine. During my time there, I experienced ideologies around identity that were so strikingly different from the cultures I had grown up in. In the communities I visited, an introduction began with the family name before the given name; you are known first as being from your people, then as an individual.
In my interactions and deepening relationships, I got to experience that all actions taken were considered from the perspective of how they would affect or reflect upon the community or family first. And as I became more integrated in the culture, became part of the family I was coming to know as my own, fell in love with the heartbeat of the land beneath my feet, came to know the language of the fig trees and water and dust, I allowed myself to surrender some of what I had thought of as core elements of my self (but were, I came to find, really just elements of my self-expression) to this collectivist way of being.
I began dressing more conservatively. I covered my tattoos. I wore modest shirts with sleeves. I buttoned my blouse up to the topmost button. I wore long slacks. Finally, I began wearing hijab—a traditional item of Muslim religious dress—to cover my hair.
And my behaviors shifted. I socialized with the women at parties even though we barely shared a language. I played and laughed and cuddled with the children in the blessed sanctuary of the women’s rooms: the kitchen, bedrooms, and living room. The men would gather in the entry room. At one gathering there was a young woman, Israa, who spoke English well. I asked her to ask the women for me, “Don’t you sometimes want to spend time with the men?” They laughed, and responded, “Why would we want to do that? With them, we would be expected to talk about things that concern the men. Here we get to talk about exactly what we want to. We talk about the children, our homes and families, and about our politics. Here we are free to be who we are.”
And I thought, yes, that is kind of the same in much of the Western world. When we are with men we are, on some level, expected to play to their needs and desires. The reasons these women spend time in the kitchen and living rooms are the same reasons that we seek women’s spaces. When we don’t find them, we create them.
I went to mosque to pray with the family’s grandmother. I sat with the ancient aunties and uncles at the family dinners. I rarely went out with men, and when I did it was always with my host there as my chivalrous guardian and chaperone. He was also my very beloved friend who trusted and loved me.
I didn’t do any of this because I felt pressured. I didn’t do it because I felt threatened or endangered when I walked or traveled alone. As a matter of fact, I have rarely felt as safe in any city as I felt in the cities and towns where I spent time in the West Bank. I did it out of respect for the family who was becoming my family. I did it to respect their name and their image and their standing. In a small town (there just like here) people will talk.
I also had another motivation—I wanted to allow myself to experience this other way of thinking and being. In a dream a group of women veiled and beautiful stood on a darkened street, waiting for me. I longed to enter their company.
As I shifted my appearance in order to integrate more fully into the culture I was finding a home in, I thought a lot about cultural and sociological agreements, identity, ethics, and priorities. I noticed deeply how familial identity was both a grounding force and a system that held to enforcement of social norms. The mindset is so different from what we experience in the dominant minority world Western paradigm.
In giving myself over to the ways of this culture that I had before no way of knowing, I got to see ways that feminism works I could never have imagined. I witnessed different ways that feminal strength is expressed and honored. I saw how holding the family and the community at the center can also put women at the center. I saw how women are held and honored in this culture that we in the Western world think of as nothing but oppressive.
And I saw the ways in which collective need being held at the center also increases scrutiny and enforcement. I saw how taking the needs of the collective before oneself can be wearing and tiring and challenging.
Individualism and collectivism have their strengths and their limitations, and we can learn from both. We can open ourselves to our own unknowns, release our ideas of ourselves, women, feminism, and spirituality. We can release attachment to the elements that define us and surrender to the process of dissolution.
When we find the stillness at the center of it all, we can engage, modify, and learn. If we can come to respectfully examine the differences, we may emerge from the process with more grounding and more liberation.
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JOURNAL: In what ways has your dedication to self-sufficiency or self-expression kept you apart from others or in other ways isolated you? In what ways have these same qualities served you? |
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ACTION: Examine the ways that your family creates community, or that your community creates family, or both. What works to bring you and your loved ones into greater relationship? Choose to do more of that thing. |