I write this perspective as the United States, located on the land of Turtle Island, is churning within its Pluto Return (last one during the American and French Revolutions of the late 1700s). The country is on the verge of democratic and financial collapse with the fascist takeover by billionaires, oligarchs, and tech bros powered by ableism, christian nationalism, fear, greed, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny, patriarchy, racism, and a lack of courage and coordinated resistance among non-MAGA Americans. It’s ridiculously fucked up.
For 10 years I have been tracking aspects of this demise, particularly (as a seasoned communications and public relations practitioner) the relationship linking social media marketing and fear based manipulation as a weapon of warfare by Russia and the far right, targeting America’s weakest links – individualism, greed, and racism. For over 6 years I have been following the national situation through an astrological lens and have been preparing for systems collapse, which is one of the foundations in the creation of EmpowR Transformation and our visions of building a world towards The Great Turning—if we can conjure the collective courage to awaken, unite, and act.
It’s been almost 2 years since I’ve written a perspective piece and this week as protests start to stake their claim in a ramp up of movement building action, I’ve got some words of medicine to offer from deep in my taproot, extending to my new and old ancestors in the stars. These words have been building for 8 years and I invite you to listen.
A LIVED EXPERIENCE PERSONAL STORY
At this time of year, 8 years ago, Venus was retrograde in Aries. In the present Venus is revisiting this exact area of our lives with a current retrograde in Aries, offering a repeat time to review how to be in relationship with our individual selves and the collective, with attention to justice for people and groups harmed by inequity and oppression.
In March 2017, I was burning out in my communications director role at a Vermont quasi-government nonprofit whose work focuses on the sustainable development of Vermont’s economy. I worked in an environment where colleagues were afraid to speak up about the inequities and injustices they experienced and witnessed in the nature of our internal and external work culture. As someone who had the courage to speak up and advocate for change, coworkers frequently came to me and not the executive director to discuss concerns, trusting me to listen empathetically and believing I had some power to affect change.
I did, but only to the extent that they would find the courage within themselves to also speak up, even though the cultural conditions and leadership at the organization did not provide a safe opportunity for them to do so. This created a pressure in my body I did not have the ability or resources to manage. Leadership refused to listen to my voice in a mutually generative way and when opportunities presented for my co-workers to speak up, they (for the most part) shied away from conflict, leaving me to bear the weight of both personal and collective struggles in the workplace.
A strategic planning session in the early spring of 2017 brought this tension to a head when rather than addressing the many elephants in the room, a white male facilitator belittled me. My co-workers leaned into avoidance out of their own discomfort and bypassed the multiple truths I raised. After years of holding their backs, they did not have mine. I had an emotional breakdown at the meeting and fled the room. Not only did no one come to see if I was okay, but a senior male co-worker came to find me and proceeded to patronize and gaslight me into thinking I was the problem and needed to change my tone, perspective, and beliefs.
My life unraveled quickly following this experience and I was soon after diagnosed with adenomyosis and arthritis (rooted in skyrocketing inflammation). The depression and anxiety of burnout with an unsustainable workload, expectations, and position of compromised power altered my brain chemistry in such a way I was no longer able to manage my emotional regulation. A few months later I was diagnosed with breast cancer and ended my employment from a job that literally made me very sick. Unable to physically or mentally find new work while in crisis, I opted for a Go Fund Me that was both well supported and highly criticized as I was trying to pay for both medical expenses not covered by insurance and a salary I had to give up for the sake of my health.
My health situation worsened with multiple surgeries that led to debilitating neuropathy leaving me partially immobile. I experienced a nervous breakdown that culminated with a suicidal episode that landed me in the emergency room followed by being admitted to a crisis facility with Washington County Mental Health.
My slow process to recovery generated a new fire to publicly speak up about my lived experience and the truth about the toxicity of capitalism and inequity in workplace culture and healthcare. My delve into ancestral healing opened the floodgates of awakening to the complexity of impacts from colonization and racism and I continued to raise my voice to impact change and speak truth to power. As I used the privilege I had as a respected communications and public relations practitioner in Vermont, I was easily rejected from the mainstream workforce and experienced limiting work opportunities which has continued to present day. Financial trauma followed and further exasperated my mental health challenges and I was diagnosed with PTSD that I continued to heal from today.
My catapult into the Underworld fueled my suppressed vision and imagination for the possibilities for New Earth. My refusal to succumb to the status quo has been a deeply challenging and surprisingly beautiful commitment to offer the medicine of EmpowR Transformation—a vision and approach that was forged from my lived experience, guided by people with more marginalized identities than my own, and is accountable to the principles of transformative justice and emergent strategy for collective liberation.
FEAR
My work since (a disproportionate amount that is unpaid) has been dedicated to working with people and co-creating community to build our collective capacity to strengthen the muscle of discomfort. I believe spreading the labor of courage to include and empower more people with privilege to speak up and show up is a shared effort to generate more impact for social and environmental justice.
The root of turning away from saying the hard things or challenging oppression in the multiplicity of ways it shows up in our personal lives, organizational operations, institutional systems, and social culture is, of course—fear. Fear that if and when we challenge unjust power our needs will not be met because of the restrictions placed upon us for challenging white supremacy, misogyny, patriarchy, ableism, and all the other forms of oppression that derive from the very foundations this country was built upon.
The antidote to fear is, of course—love. And as bell hooks says, “Love is an action.” And as Dr. Cornel West says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
I invite you to pause with me,
take a breath,
and let that metabolize in your body.
CONFLICT AVOIDANCE
There are many tenets of mainstream culture that keep us stuck in the very systems we want to disrupt (which are also the same systems that provide us with—up until this government collapse—many of the ways to meet our needs).
The fear of conflict is in some ways one of the deepest roots that needs to be unearthed for our ability to awaken, unite, and act. Fear of conflict and the defensiveness it generates is the same fear that keeps us from sacrificing aspects of our comfort to build the world we want to see and deserve to live in.
Conflict avoidance is embedded in mainstream culture. Avoiding conflict by dancing around all the ways we shimmy out of difficult conversations and situations does nothing more than exchange short term discomfort for longer term disfunction. Avoiding conflict is rewarded in relationships, families, communities, and in the workplace as the fear of loss and grief without alternate support systems keep us from stepping into courage.
Fear of conflict keeps us holding on tightly to a false narrative of a right to comfort. Never more is that evident than where we are as a country. Mainstream America was mass marketed the sale of comfort by a swindling psychopath who has manipulated half of the population by feeding into all of the possible fears with twists, lies, and hate. Blame is directed towards those who have “awakened” to the truth. So many of us are messily trying to lean into the healing antidote of empathy and communal care which is weaponized to create division (funded in part by Russia) of epic proportions. We have been tricked to cast blame and hate each other in the midst of an evolutionary collective awakening when the true source of our suffering are the billionaires and oligarchs whose greed has been shaping this country since white folks brought our trauma from Europe and projected it all over Turtle Island by stealing land, inflicting genocide, and enslaving black and brown people to build this country’s wealth.
How could we not think this system would then turn on it’s own citizens who challenge this premise? It makes me think about the insidious power of marketing (which is just a soft word for manipulation), a tactic that has been in use ever since the written word was used on a mass scale. In my ancestry it triggers the epigenetic memory of how one man (or likely a group of men) wrote and mass distributed the Malleus Maleficarum as the manual that guided the genocide of Europe’s medicine women, also known as the burning times. Ironically, it is the animist and pagan medicine of this lineage that can bring folks of Western colonizer ancestry into collective healing together.
PAUSE
I invite you to pause again and engage with me in a somatic practice to support regulating all of our nervous systems.
Take a breath.
And another one.
Notice what is happening in your body, on your skin. What do you feel?
What urge is presenting itself?
Is there defensiveness, argument, disassociation, rejection, righteousness?
What do you want to do right now?
Fight? Retreat? Fix? Cry?
Just notice.
Breathe.
Pause.
Where do you fear conflict in your life?
When are you afraid of using your voice to communicate what needs to be said?
How does silence fester in your body to create an even bigger wound?
Pause and Breathe.
AWARENESS AND COMMUNITY
With Venus in retrograde again in the same points in my life as that fateful time in 2017, I am able to reflect on an 8 year journey of courage, sacrifice, and love as an action for justice.
My own continual transformation in response to personal and collective consciousness evolution is possible for many reasons, three of which I lift up here—awareness, community, and healing.
Awareness of myself—the energy I share and project, the things I think, the meaning making I give to situations, the urges and behaviors I act upon, the emotions I experience and the feelings that arise, the sensations in and on my body and how they generate impact along the arc of ease to disease, and the possibilities I can imagine for myself and humanity.
Giving credit to Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands and the multi-years of extensive work I have done in somatic abolitionism that is now an integrated way that I live and approach the world. It was not until I began to uncover the roots of racism and supremacy in my body and in our culture that I was able to begin to heal from the roots of my personal, epigenetic, and intergenerational suffering.
Community with people on a similar path—learning how to be with beloveds in ways that intentionally address, interrogate, and hold each other accountable to how white supremacy shows up in our bodies, words, actions, beliefs, values, and relationships. A key component is building the trust in relationships so we can lean into generative conflict together, as hard as it is, rather than turn into the avoidance and comfort that has given power to where we are right now as a country.
Giving credit to Tema Okun’s compilation of Divorcing from White Supremacy Culture, a catalog of resources driven by decades of collective antiracism work and practices.
Healing beyond our individual bodies and minds—we can only do so much healing as individuals. To shape the world that is breathing into us from the plants, trees, animals, unseen beings and elemental energies that root us in our human power, we must be in interdependent relationship with the natural and supernatural world, each other as humans, and build the communities that will not only support us through this collapse, but hold us in our evolution away from oppression and towards collective liberation.
It may be a far reach for some to see these shifts as actualizing on a large scale, yet on a small scale, in the fractals of our communication and the communities we can and are building this is readily possible and is already happening.
Giving credit to adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy, Holding Change, We Will Not Cancel Us, Pleasure Activism, and additional books, poetry, songs, and podcasts that can guide us in our social and political transformation.
We have been manipulated and systematically controlled to reject or lack access to community in the paradigm of servitude and/or slavery to racialized capitalism, the emphasis on financial growth as success, and prioritizing the individual and nuclear family over the collective power and resilience of community.
Community is our salvation and the only ones to create it are us.
ACTION
I started EmpowR Transformation because I was rejected from most of the spaces I tried to bring my gifts into. I never wanted to be a white woman creating yet another silo entrepreneurial effort. However, because of the conditions and fear surrounding our society right here in Vermont and because I am a human design manifestor with a soul purpose to enact power sharing leadership from my earliest years, I had to create something to try to build community with people traveling similar paths and to do so in a way where I am also trying to survive in the toxic system of capitalism.
For 6 years I have stumbled and face planted with mistake after mistake, finding the courage and strength to continue to rise and show up again and again and again because of my kinships with ancestors, animals, elemental energy (Air, Earth, Fire, Water), planets, and people. Especially the people who build community to hold grace for imperfection and can recognize mistakes as progress.
We are building something that is both new and old. Learning through the mess with humility for all we do not know and all of the individual gifts we hold to bring into the cocreation of possibility is where we find the compassion, faith, and truth that are the only weapons for this war (Lyla June – All Nations Rise). A war waged on humanity and Earth by the reptilian energy that remains living in the bodies of greedy billionaires and oligarchs who are grasping for their last tactics of trickery and manipulation.
And to bring this back down to our roots right here on the Earth we call home who provides us with all that we need, our task is to step into courage with the support of the communities we are building, to love with our actions for justice, to speak up and show up, and to collectively strengthen our courage muscle and lean into the discomfort. Which means sacrificing comfort and trusting that the communities use are building will hold us in our evolution and transformation.
For those who appreciate To Do Lists, this is for you
In leaning into the discomfort of taking action, remember to not weaponize rest and joy against action. This is a BOTH/AND situation. We rest and experience joy to build our capacity for action—it is a cycle of uniting both the feminine and masculine—the non-binary dance that is most needed right now.
- Check in on friends and ask them how they are holding up, witness their lived experience without unsolicited advice
- Make calls to leaders working with prompts and suggestions from https://5calls.org
- Extend acts of kindness and connection to people with different political perspectives from yourself
- Ask friends and family members in Republican states to call their legislators and speak about something they are concerned about
- Support the local businesses and efforts of people in your community who are taking on risk by speaking up and showing up, lift up their work any way that you can
- Divest from corporate spending that backs MAGA and support companies that invest in DEI (this is emergent and shifting in real time and getting information from people you trust on social media is a good place to look as well as websites like Shop Your Vote and Good Unites Us
- Participate in a peaceful protest, rally or march and better yet—invite people you know to attend with you, include children, and coordinate a meeting spot as a way to build inclusive community while protesting; share your experience on social media
- Share social media posts about the resistance from people you trust, follow the people who people you trust post from, engage in posts you support to boost the algorithm, speak truth where disinformation is shared and then disengage from nonsense arguments that follow
- Choose a local or national organization that is working on resisting oppression about an issue that is important to you and participate in their activities and calls to action
- Join a community whose values align with yours that engages in mutual aid efforts to help everyone meet their needs, build relationships with people in the community, and practice support and accountability with each other (EmpowR Community is one to consider)
- Join a committee in your local town or government that relates to something you care about and participate actively in democracy
- Practice speaking up and showing up when uncomfortable and leaning into conflict instead of avoiding it so you can build your capacity for courage to speak up and show up
Rest, nourish yourself, experience joy and build your resilience so you can keep taking action.
IN CLOSING
I want to speak to my fellow Earth lovers who want to defend the “we are all one narrative” and to you I speak up:
The ‘we are all one’ narrative is a harmful one as it does not recognize the material differences created in the world that places value on some lives more than others. Through human initiated atrocities such as genocide, eugenics, racism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression of certain identities there are epigenetic gene mutations that disrupts the ‘we are all one’ spiritual bypass narrative because of the increasing number of people who are unable to have their basic needs met due to belonging to identities and groups that are oppressed and excluded from the white, hetero, male led systems. While we may share consciousness with all living beings, denying the lived experiences of people who belong to oppressed groups and have marginalized identities by perpetuating oneness narratives is actually one of the most insidious forms of racism and supremacy and creates further division and separation rather than encouraging oneness.
What we are is potential and emerging community—in many forms, practices, and elevations. Together we can hold each other and step into this moment in time with more people building awareness and action toward the solidarity of our voices. Let’s do so in a way that includes everyone—especially the children as they are the ones who can break the cultural cycle of conflict avoidance if they can see and be with us as we do the same, and if we can give them space to replace fear with love as an action for justice.
Thank you EmpowR Community for your inspiration and trust and the EmpowR Web of Change Makers, especially Elliot Ruggles, Saudia LaMont, and Sister Sankofa (Rest in Peace and Power) for your advisement, dedication, faith, and leadership. You empower me to continue to speak up and show up with heart and integrity.
WORK WITH US?
EmpowR Transformation has openings and is in need of client work. We facilitate communication, community building, and cultural healing at the roots to build capacity for navigating the complexities of change centered in social and environmental justice. We work with individuals, communities, groups, teams, organizations, and institutions to vision, strategize, and build possibilities toward collective liberation. Would you please consider booking a one-on-one session, hiring us for communication and facilitation projects, or participating in or offering our educational programs?
Thank you for listening and you are invited to share. Your time and energy is deeply appreciated.
