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Can we claim our own place in this movement? Can we trust that there is no divide ultimately, between healing ourselves and healing the world around us?

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There is a strange kind of urgency that I feel about learning to live in this kind of trust.

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I very much want to live with the question of – what is truly the best place for me in this world? Why am I here and what is the best way for me to be alive today?

Can we each trust our own way in finding what it means to live that question?

The funny thing is that we have no choice really!

We can beat ourselves up or we can beat others up for not doing enough but at the end of the day, we have to each decide what is true for us.

I keep thinking of what it might mean to be part of a community of trauma culture and embodiment healers and activists. Is there space for the ones that are in healing themselves? Is there space, in that same community for the ones who are doing civil disobedience.

Wouldn’t we be more powerful together?

Together in real relationship.

Relationship that is rooted in working toward doing away with the binaries that always want to make one person up and another down, in the hierarchical world of trauma culture.

I keep thinking that if we were together in physical community as opposed to this online world – wouldn’t it be okay for us each to show up in whatever way was most true. Wouldn’t that in itself be the thing that gave us the best chance for healing on all levels?

There was a saying back in the days of the non-violence peace movement work that I did.

It stated that there was no way to peace – that peace was the way…

Wouldn’t that also be true for what we are doing together?

If in fact, trauma culture is a possible organizing principle for building a social movement, then wouldn’t living from a place of trusting the heart and soul of who we are – be the way for us to move forward individually, as a community and as a movement?

Isolation, binaries, moralism, judgment, condemnation – are all aspects of trauma culture.

Trust, consent, discernment, resilience, inspiration, creativity on the other hand are all aspects of rebuilding a new culture of embodiment.

For me this is about developing a different understanding of what true commitment is.

It is getting under the split between commitment to self and commitment to the world around us.

It is about understanding commitment as a relationship between an acceptance of what is actually true for each of us in any given moment – while at the same time holding that acceptance, side by side with a deep opening to what is possible.

I am honestly still sorting out what that means and maybe that is part of the point.

I am aware that this world needs deep radical change.

I have my days, many of them actually,  where I wonder why I am doing anything other than being on the frontlines of civil disobedience. Why am I not doing everything that I can to disrupt business as usual, even if that means going to jail or even being hurt?

And yet for whatever reason, right or wrong, good or bad, that is not my path today.

I guess part of why I am not doing that, is because I chose to do personal healing work. I chose to do it for myself and I chose to do it with and for others.

But for me, that personal healing work led me back to these questions that we are exploring together here.

I very much believe that we need the most radical movement for healing and change possible.

 

And the most radical movement possible is one that does not play by the rules of the dominant culture.

The most radical movement possible is going to rise out of a deep understanding of how the need for personal healing, and social and environmental justice, are not just inextricably linked but are in fact the same thing.

Because of that, we need to trust the inspiration that grows out of the very personal movement away from trauma culture. We need to trust the embodied consciousness that grows out of us each finding our own voice – the voice that is not split from the depth of each of our own heart and soul.

Instead of continuing to play out the old debates about what is best, we need to deepen our support for each other, to find what is true within each of us.

 

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There is in fact an imperative of living in these times.

But that imperative is not to act from a place of disembodied guilt of always trying to do more and never being able to do enough. The imperative that we are living with is to find how to be the most of who we are.

The social passivity that has allowed the rise of this current administration here in the states is not rooted in that people don’t care. It is rooted in that we as a culture have tolerated separation from the very parts of us that actually know how to care.

That is not a moral issue.

It is a very personal issue that also takes into account the power structures that have grown out of trauma culture.

I understand for example that racism will not change without an understanding of systematic racism. Without an understanding of the power and privilege that I hold as a white person in this world.

But a real understanding of the white supremacy of this culture will not come from a place of guilt and shame.

A real understanding of social power of any kind, can only come from an understanding of the culture that drives that power structure. And the deeper part of that understanding can only come from within.

It will only come from waking from the slumber of trauma that this culture has been in for far, far too long.

There are a thousand ways to wake from that slumber.

We need each and every way. We need to each find the way that works for us and we need to figure out a way to support each other in that waking.

With tenderness, urgency and respect,
Bill St.Cyr
March 3rd, 2018
From the occupied land of the Abenaki People