Initiate Yourself: Recipes for Evolution in August 2020

Theme for August – “Channel Light through Lens and Laser”

As global unrest and uncertainty continues, it has become increasingly important to assess not only the intent of your actions (light), but also the bias of your perspective (lens) and the impact of your wake (laser).

By acknowledging and consciously choosing how you operate, you give yourself the freedom to take risks. Those risks foster growth, and your continued growth amplifies and redirects the light shining within you so the wake you leave behind glows. Your intention, perspective, and impact precede you. What path are you creating for yourself to walk?

As we become accustomed to recognizing our own light, lens, and laser, we may then extend the analogy to how we form trust with others. What do you need to know before you trust a source? What level of consistency or novelty do you need before you endorse something? What is the texture of a trustworthy person, interaction, information source, or tool?

Experiments for August

1. Decolonize Your Mind and Body – In this context, “decolonize” means choosing not to act inside of a default simply because that’s the way it has always been done. Why do you behave or react the way you do? Are you making conscious choices? As a practice, write down all the behaviors and beliefs you have but did not create. Write down where they came from, whether from family, friends, community, religion, or government, and where you feel them in your body. Have you actively chosen them for yourself? If yes, why did you choose them? If no, will you choose them now? What would it look like to pave your own way or look for role models living outside the norm?

Challenge Mode: Many governments in the world today act outside of morals and do not manage their impact well. They are often funded by corporations without the people’s best interests at heart or simply do not have the organizational capacity to operate with integrity. Either way, what decolonizing will you demand of your government? What, as an individual, would you like to see change? What behaviors or policies are left over from colonial structures and beliefs? What steps would change them?

2. The Texture of Trust – As you begin to understand your own lens, you not only trust yourself more but also slowly engender others’ trust in you. Your non-violent communication shows even before a conflict arises. Your acknowledgement of perspectives that differ from your own adds to your credibility. Your transparency draws others toward you. On your path of continual self-discovery, consider what criteria need to be met before you can trust a person, information source, or organization? How can you further embody those qualities in your own day-to-day life?

Challenge Mode: Sit with yourself or a small group in meditation. Check in with your body, acknowledging any stiff or loose areas with gentle awareness. Think of a person you trust. When you think about engaging with them, where and how do you feel trust in the body? Move onto another person. Where and how do you feel trust in the body? Are those areas different with different people? Do any colors or textures arise when you consider what trust feels like?

3. Gravity Grounding – Consciously choosing to live outside of your defaults is both immensely rewarding and terrifying. The temptation to heed the call of the lullaby and return to “normal” is strong, and though the fight will get easier, you will never stop fighting the complacency. Whenever you feel yourself sliding back into unchosen habits or patterns, take a few deep breaths. Try placing weight on your body, whether that’s a pillow, a blanket, or another body. Feel into gravity and how it always holds you. For more grounding practices, check out Ash Good and Gabby Hancher’s grounding exercises as part of their Find What Feels Good series.

Challenge Mode: Bodies benefit greatly from alternative gravity explorations. Take time this month to float in a body of water or seek out a 45-degree slant (Andra uses a freeway underpass) to explore shifting your weight and stretching while buoyant or balancing. How does this temporary change in your center of gravity ground you once you touch back down?

4. Emancipate Your Imagination – The word “emancipate,” according to the Oxford Dictionary, means “to set free, especially from legal, social, or political restrictions.” When your imagination is truly that free, what becomes possible? Without using anything you know about the current political climate in your area or being tugged down by potential obstacles, imagine your ideal world. Imagine your ideal government. Imagine your ideal economy. Imagine your ideal community. You might try this imaginative exercise. What role do you play there?

Challenge Mode: Take your imagination one step further to channel and embody your ideal self through roleplay. What would your ideal self wear? How would they talk? What would they look like? If you want an opportunity to roleplay as an ideal or divine version of yourself, check out our new online event, the Goddexx Council, a philosophical discussion space to roleplay as your highest imaginative state of being.

We also wanted to provide you with a short list of books, makers, and media that we currently trust and are watching because of how good their impact has been on us and our communities. These have been especially helpful in broadening our perspectives and challenging our defaults. Here you go:

#DotheWork by Rachel Cargle (self-led anti-racism training)

My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

13th by Ava DuVernay (documentary)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown

The Wild Unknown Journal by Kim Krans

Also, we put together a Patreon this month with special content for subscribers. Please check it out!

Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses.

Andra’s Recap of July’s Experiments

The offerings for July included upgrading temporary solutions, earning and owning your authority, analyzing catalysts for growth, and recognizing implicit bias in your activism.

Since the pandemic began, I have largely been out of work. While the initial stimulus payment did help, I have been unable to receive unemployment. Both of my partners have been very generous and understanding with me by helping me with rent and so on, but it felt time to bunker down and decide how I was going to survive this thing, so I got a job. Like, a real, grown-up, full-time job. Luckily, it’s remote, and I want to recognize how much privilege lies in the fact that I was only able to get this job because my mom also works at the company. But, this is going to give me the capacity to donate more to causes I appreciate and worry less about my own security so I can continue to help others. Don’t worry; I won’t let it interfere with these recipes or anything I do with High Priestesses. Having a job has forced me to radically shift my schedule, and that’s been an intense change, but I think I’m managing well.

I’ve also been heavily invested in my activism and have found sustainable shifts to take to be involved. Right now, I’m down at the Justice Center in Portland about three nights week for a few hours to have a firsthand experience of all the news I get from elsewhere. With as difficult as it is to trust secondhand information, this feels crucial (see my blog about navigating the media during these crises). I have a few protest signs I am proud of: one that says “As a citizen, I demand a Portland without federal enforcement, correctional facilities, armed police, or racist policies & leadership” and the other says “As a U.S. citizen, I demand that we defund the police, abolish prisons, and denounce capitalism.” Having a firm list of demands I stand behind feels good when I am standing down there with lots of other bodies who all have their own agendas. And, above all, I am amplifying and centering Black voices and the cause of Black Lives Matter.

I have had a few interesting run-ins with claiming authority. Firstly, I am trying to use my privilege to do more of the dangerous, public-facing work for the Black Lives Matter cause. So far, that has meant being very public about my protesting reports on Facebook, doing interviews where I center and repeat the messaging I have heard from Black voices, and writing the cause’s messages in chalk down in front of the Justice Center. I have also been asked to start a weekly “Empathetic Activism” thread in a FB group I am a moderator for. There have been a few times where I passed the mic off to people who could use the publicity better than I could, but it all came down to context and what the people around me were comfortable with. Many of the people in my life, both white and BIPOC, have thanked me for my efforts, which make me feel like I’m on the right track, though I am continuously learning what it means to show up as a positive force.

The most obvious unfortunate event that caused an unexpected benefit in my community is the appearance of the federal officers (DHS Border Patrol) in Portland. Though it is terrible and they have been just as, if not more, violent than our local police, the protests bloomed from just under 300 people per night to 2,000 and sometimes as many as 5,000 people per night as soon as this happened. This energy has momentum to make some serious change in our city, and more organization is happening every day.

I’ve looked hard this month at my implicit biases, especially around colorism. To give an example, one speaker at a protest I went to discussed how it’s racist to always trust and defer to the person with the darkest skin for that reason alone. It’s also racist to assume a person with lighter skin is white and therefore disregard their statements. We need to be thinking critically and treating everyone like a peer, and that also means not being afraid to voice constructive criticism, after you have educated yourself on the issues and pledged to be a continual student of anti-racism, of course.

I know that 2020 continues to ask a lot of each and every one of us, but I believe in our capacity to prevail, and we are on the cusp of radically transforming all the systems that have caused harm to people for thousands of years. Rip off those bandages and begin to heal as a new world.

Much love to you all. Remember, “the only lasting truth is change.”*

*Quote from Octavia Butler