Below is a slightly edited transcript of the above video, including a few changes I’d make in a future iteration of this video. To learn more about my community-oriented side, please visit my other site, The Bramble Project.
Before I began offering core energetics as a practitioner, I spent a good two decades of my life working super hard to make the world a better place on the outside, through community-oriented work.
One of the things that I came to find through core energetics was that every bit of pain and suffering that I was fighting against in our human family was also within me.
I was fighting myself from the inside.
I had an extractive relationship with my own body—producing, producing, producing—and had lost touch with the animal body within. I didn’t even know how to steward my own physical landscape.
I had learned to control and suppress the most hurt, vulnerable, scared, and angry parts of myself.
I realized that if I’m to live in a world where every being belongs, which is what I want, then I need to also live in a world where every part of me also belongs within me.
And the same with everyone else. All parts of us need to belong. That includes the parts of us that blame. That hate. That are pissed off. That judge. That deny. Because those are often the gateways to our deepest vulnerabilities and our truest connectedness.
So, I love the moments in core energetics when someone takes the risk to feel something they’ve been afraid to feel, or to acknowledge or express or change something they’ve been afraid of. Because when we’re able to let go of some of the efforting of being a good person, of living a good life, of making a positive contribution—we can let that thing that we sometimes call life force energy, or Dao (Tao), or universal consciousness, we can let that take over and point the way forward.
To me, that shared consciousness that we each source our essence from is really the only thing that’s big enough to hold the complexity of the human condition.
We’re each like a cell in a collective body that’s in a great deal of pain right now. Depending on the lives that we were born into, and our socialized identities, and our lived experiences, we each know a little different corner of that collective pain.
[Significant edits in the next three paragraphs] When I was able to find more space for the pain within me, I learned that it’s possible to transform that pain back into the love, wisdom, and power that I source from.
Through this process, I’m learning to access more curiosity and creativity in places where I previously felt frustrated and stuck and judgmental.
I’m learning to speak truths I didn’t know I’d had, while still leaving space to take in the complexity of other people’s truths.
I think it’s not just our power, but also our longing, to experience that for ourselves—to take the part of the pain in our collective body that we know, transform it back into love, wisdom, and power, and through that begin to untangle just a little bit more of the stuckness in our collective body.
We live in this paradox. We can’t be well until our communities and our worlds are well. At the same time, our communities and our worlds can’t be well until we individually are well.
I don’t call this work “healing” because the wholeness is already here. It’s just twisted up within the folds of our experience.
All I want to do is support the unfolding and the untwisting of others, so that you can live the life that you came into your body to live, and be who you came here to be.
And through that, we can discover together more of who we really are as a human family.
filmed near babaqʷəb
on Duwamish land and Coast Salish waters
May we reunite with our truest selves,
in relationship with the humans and non-humans
who share our world and home.