Grounding in our power response, transforming silence into healing

Grounding in our power…

What is inner Justice? This question feels so loaded to me today. One of those topics I feel i just have to sit with. 

Thank you so much for sharing this post and the practice you have been doing. I read your post and just went with it, started doing the practice and ended up moving through it moving out a lot of emotional blockage. And I wanted to share my process here as a response to your post but also to assimilate and further digest all that has been coming up for me. 

I have been working with my relationship with silence. It started on Thursday, when I found out about George Floyd’s death from a Sonya Renee Taylor post, the author of “The body is Not an Apology.” I was helping a friend move at the time, so I was receiving her response while being really physically active, and exhausted. Only really able to be with it, no able to really have a response yet.  And then the next day, I was feeling really sucked in to what was going on, but I noticed I was feeling really numb and indifferent. I was witnessing so much grief, rage and anger but was not able to feel anything and that really bothered me. Dr. Zel had posted a chart that showed a racism scale and I just saw the word indifference and I was like ok I need to check in with this. And I was receiving from a lot of teachers and healers i really respect information about white silence, and how it’s complicit to the injustice going on. And I was feeling all of this tension from the rise of the collective body, and feeling really locked up with silence in general. I don’t like posting on social media, and I feel really uncomfortable speaking out using that platform. But the demand I was receiving from these black  healers and educators was tugging on these frozen, locked up, places of fear in my nervous system. And cracked the spell of numbness that helped my soul move with me here into this inner journey into the divisions of human evolution through the races. Into the origins of separations. The maos were helping me see it in these esoteric ways relating to the black and white, spirit and matter war programming intertwined in humanity and working out in this divine human play. Which helped me move through a lot of what felt like ancestral stagnancy getting all clogged up in me. Felt like sludge moving through an old drain pipe, wasn’t pretty. But after that I found my agency to speak up and say how I felt and at 2 in the morning when I could not sleep from all of this roaring turmoil in the collective body, I had to write out this post on FB and actually break my silence. That was a whole thing, an important thing that opened up a rabbit hole of meeting the silence within me in general. Like why is it hard all of the time to ever speak up, or join in, what am I afraid of?

So I have been musing with this for the past couple of days and I found an Audre Lorde essay from a list of resources that was being passed around. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” is what its called. And it definitely poked at some things. She was writing about her own process of breaking silence and finding power in her speaking her truth. I like this chunk,

“In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.”

and another quote from this essay, 

“That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”

Yessss, cast out the illusions of separation to speak from the truth of our fucking wisdom. 

These words were helping me align with the being of Truth. Holding me as I embody this rupture of human experience. Finding that when my voice is in tune with the truth, it means it is in tune with the collective cry and collective need and will speak in the appropriate response. And her words were helping me start to find my way to feeling that place within where my vulnerability meets power. And feel from where I am, my voice has transformative power and I can move with it in just the right way.   add to the creative continual growth of humanity. From where ever we are we can help the collective body. From silence, and violence we can move. 

So that is a little bit of context from where I am coming from as I move through this practice that you shared with me. All of this stuff for me is so related to SK and the Mother, and the experiential pattern of  SK repressing what was too intense to allow up to be integrated in consciousness. i am holding a lot of that stuff for him. Everything that felt held back, and pent up, that has become now violent with rage and needs to be heard. There for there being so much trauma around moving what needs to be heard, fear or rejection, or being struck down. Even these riots are manifestations of the same pattern. Needs and voices constantly being oppressed, gaslit and held away until they need to break loose to really get our attention. 

And wow I can’t even imagine what that is like to carry that experience around in a black body in this country. Can only speak for what is emerging in this body which holds a lot of processing for the Mother’s healing with SK, and those polarities coming back together after moving through an evolutionary journey of separation. We work on this pattern of being held down a lot. And down the rabbit hole that is where I am sourcing some of these patterns of silence in me. 

Soooo, here is my process of moving with the practice you share which was so helpful.

Feel the tension, fear, anxiety, or discomfort that is here.

Name & witness it - What is it? What is it saying? Why is it showing up right now? What is it afraid of?

I feel hurt in my chest, and it says I am not ok. It says I don't know how to open right now, pressure to open is really scary and it feels safer to be little. This hurt feels like gravity and it pulls me, it pulls tears from me. My tears drop heavy on my chest like the rain outside hitting the receptive ground.  I am finding how hard it is to hold space for this feeling and be receptive. One of those feelings that feels better hiding in the shadow. Being seen, there is shame, self hatred, trying to hide itself. Saying to me I am sorry I feel this way, Sorry I hold this. Sorry I am pain. I am sorry I am not who you think I ought to be. Can you love me anyway?

I pause to meet the response moving in me that says ok, I will integrate you feelings and love myself here. Forgive me for leaving you out.

Then ask yourself: What is this voice trying to do *for* me? 

Is it trying to keep you safe or protect you? Is it trying to warn you about something? Is it trying to bring about balance?

It is trying to say hey, here is this part of you that got really hurt and is really scared you wont ever hear it because it feels so in pain. it just needs to know that it is ok to be how it is right now. It is just saying hey i am here, i am not the only part of you, but i am letting you know of the breadth of emotion, feeling and experience that you are... love is here too.

it is trying to show me how big I really am, how strong I really am for carrying this part within me and how I can recognize this strength when i let it merge with me. But it still says I am afraid to be. It feels related to the balance of the little in me with the leader/teacher in me. It's grieving through me to come into balance. This part of me feels like I actually want and need to be little and receive care from this state to grow.

What would help this underlying need feel more taken care of right now?

Its intense because I see this part of me black and blue, and very tender and its like i am sorry but i just need to be taken care of right now, i just need to be touched so gently and be put in such a safe soft place and allowed to heal and take my time, please don’t expect me to be any more than where i am right now.

please don't focus on trying to change me, trying to heal me in urgency, please respect me as i emerge within you right now, please hold the hurt and respect it, even if you don't understand it. And know that just because your feeling this does not mean your not powerful or loved…you never lost that.

i tug with this place and feel like I should be at some other place than I am right now, because I prefer images and ideals of power that I am familiar with. I am not as used to recognizing the power in holding oneself in deep hurt. I mean I make it a practice but its still hard, because I feel like I was not taught to hold breaking down as something sacred. Feeling weak raw and fragile as something powerful in itself. Like a seed cracking open, a stage of inner development cracking open. Power to feel so so vulnerable and just go there. 

Tessa your mao was helping me a little bit after the RAJ class and I felt so pent up because I had so much to say, so much power in the form of knowledge about the very subjects that were being discussed. But you know, it was not my class to teach, and I did not really feel space to guide the conversation with what I had to say, so I held everything back, everything i care about and work on, i held back.

And your mao addressed how uncomfortable that feels, to sit and know that you have loaded power and potential and then to just sit in silence with it. Feel it, hear it in others sharing their wisdom. Then he said something that shed light to this tension. He said "just because you were silent does not mean you did not have power", which was what I was holding without realizing it. I was equating my silence to powerlessness. And that really helped me to also see how I was wanting to speak from this place of unsolved powerlessness, and I wanted from this place to be seen and heard, and I really wanted this unseen power to be validated. 

And now I am putting it all together feeling like when we take time to give these hurt voices the space to be heard like with this practice. Yes, like you are saying, we can work and share from a well place. Which I think aligns us with our truth. Truth set us free, truth is movement, truth is renewal. Aligning to truth is an integration process.

And I agree this could definitely help move with activated racial trauma. One thing we were talking about in the class today, because we were talking about healing white supremacy and learning to digest the part of it that is coming up in us, in just the right way, is that sometimes that may lead you into other things you did not expect. And that actually feels kindred to April Harter’s idea of how starting with healing racism you end up moving into healing family/childhood trauma. We were talking about you could start from any place, and the intelligence of the body, and the collective network will lead you through all of the places you have to open up to where you need to go. Through all of these interconnected layers. And I think this practice you shared is helpful to keep going and moving through the layers of the onion. 

I will speak more about inner justice, what the Ritual as Justice school teaches about it and my own thoughts in another post. Have a lot to say as always, but just have to be with the healing process right now and my body says its time to log off.

Thanks for listening, with love, 

Isabella