First of all I want to socially locate myself. It’s important to do that, as Michelle Cassandra Johnson teaches. (In fact I have learned so much from working with Michelle I must credit her for much of the understanding that I’m expressing here. Follow her, support her work, and tell others.) I also want to talk about how the work I’ve been engaged in for a long time is the perfect set up for turning into the moment- not away from it.
My feelings and opinions, though, are my own- I’ve learned to speak from my own “experience, strength and hope”- and acknowledging social location and positionality also shows that my experience of the moment and that of Black and Brown individuals is likely very, very different. (Yoga teaches this- more on that below.) I get to blog about it, intellectualize it, turn the news on or off, feel or not feel the impact of current events, and so on. Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) are and have been living it since white colonizers stole the land we live on and began the age of enslavement and systemic oppression hundreds of years ago.
So, my social location: I’m a 46 year-old, college educated, middle class, white, cisgendered woman living with a chronic illness, raised in Richmond, Virginia, USA during the Reagan and Bush Sr. and Clinton eras against a backdrop of ballooning capitalism and military- and prison-industrial-complex ideology and mass incarceration of young Black men (aka the “War on Drugs” among other structures). I’m currently self-employed teaching meditation and embodiment practices with individuals and as a Leadership Trainer for the Yoga of 12 Step Recovery, a program created by Nikki Myers. In doing so I stepped years ago into a dual lineage invested in the work of truth telling, accountability, spiritual practice and service.
For me, my recovery comes first. It has to. Anything I prioritize over personal recovery I have learned, will be lost. I understand for some that may be a difficult statement to see as anything other than bypassing, but it is the truth, and a common agreement within recovery dynamics. I’ve written copiously about recovery in the past and defined that process elsewhere- but it also perfectly sets us up for anti-racism work so I have to name that here. In recovery we look at our conditioning and the ways our conditioning has caused harm. This is a very necessary early step in anti-racist work.
Another way my dual lineage sets me up for this work is that as my Yoga teacher Rolf Gates says, it’s a lot easier for us to do front-line work if both parties are self-regulated. I know can’t control the other person, but I can manage myself. Yoga empowers me with self-regulation tools that make hard conversations and boundary-setting possible. I can remain embodied. I can root, ground and take a deep breath as I’m in interaction. It makes it possible to listen, without reacting from anger, though I may well feel uncomfortable, and even angry. (It’s hard not to, right now.)
Rooting, grounding, and breathing deeply are also often an unexamined privilege within the “wellness community,” especially now as “oppression takes the breath away” from Black and Brown people (Michelle, again). A privilege is anything I have that I didn’t earn, and from which I may expect to continue to benefit, usually because of my social location. There are areas I have lots of privilege, such as being white, and a citizen of the US, and others where I have less, such as having a chronic illness and being female.
Finally, the Yoga and Recovery paths are upheld by a system of ethics and are both invested in an engaged, conscious form of harm reduction- that looking at our speech, thoughts, and actions today can prevent suffering tomorrow. I’m all in on that one. I can’t change the past but I can live my way into a different, and better future.
I’d like to say more about centering myself in this work. I have seen statements that we as white people should not center our feelings. I think there is a role for emotion- and emotions are energy. The nature of energy is to move; however energy only moves when we make space to feel our emotions. Those feelings can be a catalyst for action, when combined with personal commitment. I don’t fool myself that my feelings, in and of themselves, matter much on this issue- and I certainly don’t expect approval or affirmation from anyone, especially BIPOC individuals who happen to read this. In fact, I don’t want anything at all at this moment. My aim is to hold myself accountable for where I’m at right now. Perhaps, by writing, I will also see other white women like me step up and do the same. In truth telling, and only then, there is the possibility of liberation.
I wrote some of what follows in 2018 during the Kavanaugh hearings (with a few minor edits for relevance) and it reflects ideas that are as true today for me as they were then.
“That said, I’ve been feeling every conceivable emotion (from anger, to sadness, to crushing anxiety) when confronted, again, with actions of misconduct by white men in power. There is an intense, overwhelming sense of hopelessness that comes when I recognize that this culture clearly, on the whole, does not equally care for, or actively oppresses, harms or seeks to render powerless its women, BIPOC, the poor, non-citizens, the young, the old, the differently abled, non-cis-gendered, and others. I believe what we are seeing at the level of white-centered politics and public discourse (if you can call it that) is born of denial of responsibility and white bypassing- conveniently overlooking the ways whiteness has created a system that upholds white supremacy and violence. And the activism of the current moment is the natural reaction of people in crisis repressing anger and rage until someone or something happens to validate it and give it power and a voice (in this case, the viral-video murder of George Floyd by a members of the Minneapolis police).”
In Y12SR Leadership trainings, we ask: If you are wondering whether you are addicted to something, note the felt sensation when it is denied or its removal threatened. What is the physiological change? We might say that the white response and need to police the protests in response to Floyd’s murder is a form of reaction to the threat of a changing power.
Addiction to power is insidious and always finds a way, in very much the same way addiction to substances will always find a way unless those under its power arrive at a deep desire to change. Emotions, again, are energy, and when oppressive forces of addiction are unchecked, emotions can go inward, turning to rage and incapacitating pain. Resentments made flesh. I’ve experienced this in the context of my own addiction. It is devastating.
I’ve deliberately tried to push through my mental blocks, blind spots, and cognitive dissonance around inequity and “isms”- as my spiritual practice demands that I do (or else it’s only another way to bypass human suffering- my own and that of others). Doing so requires a heartfelt commitment, steady effort, but especially putting myself in the company of others in similar inquiry- who wish to, in service of something greater than ourselves. In short, tapas, svadhyaya, and isvara-pranidhana. In sangha. The beloved community. From this, I feel a sense of empowerment, of possibility, even of hope. Those emotions can then move, shape-shift, and become a gift- and that gift can inspire action.”
In my dual lineage practice it’s also necessary for me to clearly evaluate the places my energy is best spent. I doubt I’ll convince a hard-core white Trump supporter to examine their privilege and systemic racism (though I’ll never give up hope) but I might convince someone who knows what happened in Minneapolis, or Louisville, or New York City, Tallahassee, or Satilla Shores, and countless other cities in our country, a country supposedly founded on freedom from tyranny, is not only wrong but unconscionable and unacceptable, yet is unclear what to do next- and I might encourage that person, sitting in their whiteness, to open up to their own complicity in a system we were born into, we co-created and we lived our way into.
Did I create white supremacy? Did I dream it up? No, but I benefit from it. Am I a racist? I’ve learned that if a white person is born, they are born into racism- it is part of our way of life. it is also woven into our DNA, as descendants of those who oppressed and enslaved Black people. If I allow these things to happen and say nothing at all, take no action, and do no part to educate myself, then yes, I am participating in racism. And to my white friends, we suffer too from our own racism. We are lulled into a sleepy, anaesthetized sort of comfort in our own privilege that renders us virtually powerless to change the system that was devised to keep us silent, complicit, subservient to whiteness… a construct created to keep us separated at best, and neutral when our Black and Brown community members are murdered, at worst. It is dehumanizing to disconnect from our capacity for empathy for the experience of others. We are social-emotional beings. And for those of us invested in spiritual practice, an acknowledgement of this is putting first things first. In my experience we cannot change what we do not first acknowledge.
Hell is the place nothing connects… so says T.S. Eliot. It’s time to connect the dots.
Wake up, white friends. Wake up and meet me on the field of truth telling.
