I have taken a few days to step outside of my everyday life to be alone and meditate. I have been absolutely shocked at the chaos of my mind, as I am every time I truly arrive into the present moment. The shocker is how rare this presence truly is.
When I wake up in the morning here I gather wood to make a fire before meditating, and while I do that I think about meditating. While I am meditating I notice how tight my hips feel after sleeping on a foreign mattress, and I can’t stop fantasizing about my yoga practice which will follow my mediation. During my yoga practice, I’ve almost completely mentally moved on to preparing myself a cup of tea and sitting down to write. Even now, to be honest, I am thinking of my breakfast.
In addition, I’m thinking of all the details of cleaning this little cabin before I leave, I’m worried about not having enough milk for when the shops are closed for New Years, and yes, I’m planning all of 2024. This little downhill race train of my mind has an incredible amount of momentum, and most of my life it is dragging me down the tracks.
As I become aware of this chronic habituation I catch glimpses of what is behind it. Myself, and everything else, just existing in this moment. Pure presence, ripe with the remembrance that there is no where to go because this is all there is.
I remember a time when I was so sure that any change in the world would happen from within, from each individual waking up on a spiritual level. This was a time before I understood colonization, the destructive nature of capitalism, and all the systems of oppression that keep the world on its own train track of suffering.
I am driven mad by spiritual communities’s claims that everything can be solved by an individual’s spiritual practices. Embodiment - the ability to feel into your own body with curiosity, also happens in a context. This includes having the time and money to commit to practices, and it also includes being physically safe enough to feel like you can show up in your own skin. This context includes intersectional generational trauma, gender identity, race, mental health, whether or not you are in chronic pain, access to therapy, and access to community to support you in your personal/spiritual growth, just to name a few factors. I am careful to not be dismissive of these levels of complexity because it is this very dismissal from the white-washed world of yoga and spirituality that has pushed me away from these conversations and led me to feel less than comfortable in spirituality-centered crowds. Critical thinking and questioning our biases and influences are also powerful spiritual tools, they point us towards the dark corners of our psyche so we know where to shine the flashlight to dismantle our own internalized oppression. They make true self-love and universal human empathy more possible.
Holding all of that, I’m noticing that I’ve tipped the scales towards hyper focusing on the external, and in that I’ve forgotten my own power. The truth is, the two are not separate, and whenever we declare that either the inner is a one way street to the outer, or vice versa, we have forgotten something crucial.
I used to herd sheep each Winter for a Diné family (known more commonly as Navajo) on a reservation in what is called Arizona. One thing that fascinated me about being there was the complete lack of conversation about “tomorrow.”If I asked the question, for example, if I should take the sheep north or south to graze the following day, I would be totally ignored. Even massive happenings like the slaughtering and butchering of a goat seemed to happen almost spontaneously. Despite comments being made about how juicy a certain member of the herd was looking for several weeks before hand, it was the morning of that it was decided he was to be taken from the corral to meet his fate. Extended family would arrive ten at a time in the back of pick-up trucks, and like magic a feast hosted by one hundred year old Grandma would be had, all with no apparent planning. I could say so much more about how time seemed to work here. I could talk about how much history could be discerned in a square foot of mesa dirt, about how each animal that walked across it could be so easily read by eyes trained through generations living on one piece of land for hundreds and hundreds of years. I watched weather be predicted incredibly accurately by a rainbow ring around the moon or by the call of coyotes, and yet tomorrow was never taken for granted.
It occurs to me now that being stuck in the past and fretting about the future is an ancient product of the colonization of our minds. I notice how when I am just here, the tree that is in front of me radiates a sort of being that is infinitely more profound than the knowledge I have in my mind that it is alive. I move through the world honoring the physical as alive, everything comes and returns to the living breathing Earth. I consume less, and more mindfully. When I am present, I allow myself to be myself in a group of friends without the protective guise of my own self-image, of my own ego. There is a vulnerability and an openness to connection that becomes possible, which in turn creates community, which allows for skill-sharing, food sharing and the gifting of services. This openness allows for the people to reclaim the things which we have learned to buy and outsource to an impersonal capitalized system.
How we relate to our own bodies is another direct bridge to the inner and outer levels of colonization. When we show up in the moment and listen to our bodies as a guide, we remember them as holy. So many of the sexist, racist and agist external pressures the world is constantly bombarding us with seem almost laughable when we remember our skin and bones are sacred Earth, too. In this forgetting we try to colonize the bodies of our partners and lovers too, we become possessive of them without questioning why we feel we deserve exclusive access to another person’s body.
I am remembering in my heart that it is possible to hold multiple truths. We must educate ourselves and keep a keen eye for our privileges and biases, but we mustn’t forgot to be present because that is the only place where love lies, and without love its all pointless. I can’t think about of any of this without putting it in the context of Gaza, and the levels of heartbreak that I cannot even begin to grasp because I have been so lucky never to experience war. And yet I am remembering that I hold a potent inner tool for transformation. It is because I have the privilege to take time for spiritual practices, I feel a responsibility to do so. Being present in my own body changes the way I treat myself and the people around me. It changes the way I treat the Earth. So much ripples out from here.