ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 33
Often in the journey to justice, we start with the problem, conjure trauma spirits, and then hopefully
offer solutions. What if we were to begin our social justice work by bringing forward that which
allows us to metabolize what no longer serves us? What if we were to build our shared capacity
to compost the trauma of injustice into nutrients to feed a more loving world? We are envisioning
pathways to justice rooted in love that are made with our collective composted pain, anger, frustration,
and fear.
“What matters is that this country was built on racism, domination, and genocide. That’s
what matters. And we’ve tacitly agreed to it and enabled it for a really long time. A lot
of the violence and harms we’re seeing right now is just a manifestation of that original
bad. It’s like an old, old baked in thing: You can’t actually have America and our brand
of democracy without this other thing. And we’ve never reckoned with that, there’s no
space. We’ve never composted it, we’ve never sorted through our history, our choices as a
country and said, these are problems, these are possibilities. We talk about reparations,
but that truth-telling part, right, that’s the composting.”
—Trish Tchume
We’re connected in visible, tangible as well as invisible, spiritual ways. As so many leaders and
visionaries who have come before us have reminded us in different ways – when one is oppressed, none
can be totally free. Our liberation is wrapped up in the liberation of others, even those who we disdain.
Opening ourselves up to this kind of love with mutuality requires us to cleanse and metabolize that
which makes us put up walls of separation between ourselves and others.
SELF-CLEANSING
HEALTHY DIGESTION OF
THAT WHICH DOES NOT
SERVE THE WHOLE
MUTUALITY
As we immerse ourselves in the cleansing and digestion processes, we are transformed by it.
Reconnecting to our ancestral knowledge, we find spiritual icons dedicated to this process - a
reminder of how sacred this work is. The Nahuatl deity, Tlazoteotl, for example, found in the Valley
of Mexico, is dedicated to metabolizing the lust, filth, vice, desire of humanity as part of a continuous
cycle of purification, regeneration, and rebirth. Mayan deities, similarly, all have powers to give life
as well as take away life. The dual and cyclical nature of sin and purification, as in death and life, is an
ongoing rhythm of the universe. We can’t have one without the other. By cleansing, we rigorously
and continuously interrogate our inner being, in the journey towards becoming fully human, in deeply
interconnected and just relationships with all that is.
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