Initiate Yourself: Recipes for Evolution in September 2020

Theme for September – “I Woke Up and It Was Political”*

Heading into a Mars retrograde that will last until the end of the year, it’s time to get serious about our plans for the fall, and unfortunately we’re not talking about holiday plans with family or back-to-school jitters (although those definitely play a role); we are preparing for the futures we don’t want to happen.

In the next few years—or perhaps sooner—we will discover whether we are only death doulas ushering out a dying world or we are survivors living through the pivotal moment when we all wake up and realize both the damage we have done to the Earth and to each other. And, at least in the United States, that line in the sand feels like it may come soon, very possibly with the upcoming election.

We will need to make difficult decisions. We may be closer to death, grief, hatred, and fear than we ever have been in our lives. We may need to know how we will act in extreme situations, including what we are prepared to do and what we are prepared to watch others we care about do.

While we would so much like to be talking about play instead, the truth is that the whole world is politicized right now, and as spaceholders, we would be remiss to ignore this. Embrace the pain, welcome the longing for change, and summon your righteous anger. We will need it.

*quote from the poem “I Woke Up” by Jameson Fitzpatrick

Experiments for September

1.      What Is Your Apocalypse Plan? – No, for real. Think about where you will go and who you will protect should a natural disaster or conflict happen in your area. Where will you get water? How will you get food? Who in your friend group might be trained to morally handle weapons? Ask yourself about the systems you can put in place now that will make it easier to live in a future where you don’t have everything you need immediately around you. While you may never need it, the preparation will give you peace of mind you desperately need.

Challenge Mode: Saving up money may be helpful in a disaster scenario, but what may be more helpful (especially if the value of money is no longer meaningful) is acquiring objects, resources, and materials that will sustain you if you lose access to the internet or other amenities. What books would you want to have on hand if you needed to survive on your own? Do you have maps of your area?

2.      What If Everything Is More Intelligent than You Thought? – What if the people, animals, plants, land, water, and other aspects of the environment were all far more intelligent than you ever imagined? What if your body was far more intelligent than you can currently comprehend? Imagine and live into that world. Ask yourself how it would shape your worldview. How does this alter what you believe to be reality? What does it mean when you can’t simply call someone an idiot for beliefs you don’t logically understand?

Challenge Mode: Recognize that rationality becomes both compromised and overridden when trauma is involved. And when behaviors that stem from trauma become longstanding, they can start to look like personality. And when traumatized personalities come together, that can start to look like culture.** In what ways can you empathize with the people who have experienced trauma around you? How do they identify with that trauma? How does this perspective help you deescalate difficult situations?

3.      What Would It Take to Change Your Mind? – The world, and especially the political world in the United States, is actively polarizing, and people are becoming more and more rooted in their own morality and beliefs. From a defensive posture, it is nearly impossible to change a person’s mind. What would it take it change your mind on something you fundamentally believe or disbelieve? What would be enough proof? Look for ways to offer such proof to the people around you.

Challenge Mode: Expose yourself to beliefs that are different from your own this month. Challenge your ability to stay rooted in your structure. Experience what the alternate reality of the other side of the spectrum is like if only for the sake of understanding where people are coming from and why they so vehemently believe what they believe. Learn how to speak their language so you can better communicate with others in the future.  

4.      How Do You Experience Somatic Intuition? – Imagine for a moment that every itch, every tingle, every twinge in the body was an attempt at communication. What could you learn? What narratives would you begin to hear? Pay attention to even the minutest sensations in your body and ask yourself why they might be happening. Try not to dismiss anything as a fluke or random accident. Treat your body as a sentient being capable of intelligent—if physical—conversation.

Challenge Mode: How do you learn to trust your gut reactions? Which uncontrollable behaviors or experiences do you have that communicate useful information about the situation around you? Which sensations are too strong or fail to be helpful? Which sensations fade too quickly?

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

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**Idea sourced from My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

Andra’s Recap of August’s Experiments

The offerings for August included decolonizing your mind and body, analyzing the texture of trust, grounding with gravity, and emancipating your imagination.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about My Grandmother’s Hands, a book about white, Black, and police trauma around race, and it has done a lot for my understanding of how, when, and why people act the way they do in the situations we all now find ourselves in. Understanding that everyone is having to confront their shadows around race now that the conversation has been forced, I simultaneously have compassion for people whose ways of life are radically shifting but also find it important and valuable to keep having those tough conversations and keep the pressure on. The Black Lives Matter cause is not a cause that is going away.

One notable example is that a coworker of mine from a long time ago recently reached out on social media again after I had unfriended him for what I felt were racist posts about Colin Kaepernick. I said, if he wanted to be friends with me again, I needed him to prove to me that he was not racist and could do so by stating one anti-racist thing he had done since George Floyd’s death. He couldn’t name one and in fact told me that police violence was almost always justifiable, and so I knew that he was not a person I could let back into my life. I suppose, in that way, I have identified that I really only want close friends who are willing to put in the work to decolonialize their thinking, and that’s a firm boundary I am learning to hold.

Thinking about trust this month was exceptionally fruitful for me. I participated in a psychedelic trip partly around this question and found for myself that trust was a color. An opalescent metallic purple color. And anything with that texture and residue was something I knew I could implicitly trust. I got caught up thinking “well, why that color?” but that didn’t seem to matter. It just is. And it is beautiful.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about how I can trust trust itself. How do I know when my trust has formed out of my own (possible racial) biases? I have been trying to check myself and root out the biases where I can to make sure that I have a framework of building trust that I trust.

Additionally, I have become very passionate about learning about how to trust my water source. I started asking where my water came from and who controlled it. I started thinking about how CHAZ (the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone) was forced to disband in part because the city shut off access to water. So, if we are not allowed to have water unless we participate in the government, how can any of us truly act independently? I also spent a lot of time thinking about Flint, MI, which—after six years—still does not have a reliable water source, and 57 percent of the populace is Black. This idea that lack of water can and has been used as a weapon and as an act of environmental racism has refueled my desire to stand behind people of color as they continue to air their longstanding grievances.

Grounding with gravity has mostly come to play in a subconscious urge to put my hand over my chest when I need to calm down. I also typically tell myself to breathe or say “and we’re breathing” as a cue to calm myself down. I also recently got bunnies, and they have been very calming, emotionally supportive, and cuddly.

Regarding emancipating my imagination, I have really taken it upon myself to make sure that I am thinking critically about the world I hope will one day exist (a world where there is literally no need for police or prisons and everyone is very sexually open and free and consensual) and making sure that the language I use now lines up with that. For instance, I avoid using vast generalizations or always/never statements about the world now so that I am not closing down possibilities for the future. It is demonstrably important to me.

I hope you enjoy this month’s offerings! Stay aware and prepare for the futures yet to come.