Good morning y’all,
The sunlight is streaming into the cabin from which I write, just north of Taos, in a place I first encountered in 2018 that changed the course of my life. Being here then is largely why I am here now. Something in me awakened in the way the sun reaches over the mountains here and filters through wide skies filled with clouds, like a seed waiting for the perfect conditions to crack open with its own becoming.
I am so happy to be here, and I hope that this feeling can reach its way to you. Where are you now? What does it feel like there? Is there something in your environment that catches your eye and strums a chord in your core with sweetness? A pet? A photograph? Steam rising from a mug?
Today’s post is to officially honor a ritualistic birthday tradition I started last year on my 33rd: an annual list of learnings, cultivated medicines, and ideas I'm sitting with. I'm excited to swirl them into our collective sourcepool of wisdom. I turned 34 last Sunday and was absent here, so I’m grateful to meet you today with 34 things and one to grow on. ;)
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Also, I’m excited to announce today that I am teaching another version of my course, Cultivating Culture, *in person* in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I know most of you are not located here, but if you are or know someone who is, I would love your support in sharing this widely.
Learn more here! And check out the website for some other exciting updates I’ll share more about soon.
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Lastly, I know joining as a paid subscriber with a recurring donation does not appeal to everyone. If you would like to support my devotion here on a one-time basis, I would be deeply honored and grateful. You can do so via venmo @HeyRachel.
Ok that’s it! I love you!
Til next time,
Rachel
“The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.
... And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The most potent definition of healing I’ve discovered through my journey is: “expanding our capacity to be with.” This does not mean increasing our tolerance for injustice, it means widening our ability to sustain ourselves, to build healthy relationships, to meet discomfort with skillfulness, to grow ourselves in a garden of abundant resources to navigate through life and brighten the world.
It is only through meeting our shadows that more light is reachable and radiated.
Personal responsibility is supremely liberating when it’s met with self-forgiveness. At the very root of each of my significant traumas, I was surprised to find myself. As I descended into the underworld, into the darkened recesses of my mind and body where my traumatic memories had stored themselves in synapses and fascia, I “met” all the people responsible for the traumatizing behaviors and actions, and I processed through pain and release with each of them. But ultimately, it was myself I found at the bottom. This was consistently one of the stickiest tethers to suffering: that deep, deep, deep down in the most ancient seed moments of traumatic experiences, I had blamed myself as an attempt to control the situation. The level of grief I felt seeing that this trauma was stuck because I believed I was bad or that I deserved it (a very common and conditioned trauma response/survival strategy) was immense. But when I could meet myself with compassion and forgiveness, a whole network of trauma could finally dissolve and I was just that much more free.
When you combine this level of personal responsibility (through a commitment to self-awareness) with humility and accountability, any judgments, criticisms, or accusations waged against you can more easily be distinguished as either 1) a helpful contribution to your continual growth; or 2) a projection that can slide right past you without damage – met with compassion but not internalized.
As you increase those four qualities (personal responsibility, humility, accountability, compassion for self and other), you increase your choicefulness to either integrate or ignore what comes at you. This becomes especially powerful when confronted with attempts to degrade or demean your character. When you know yourself beautifully and you are willing to accept your own humanity in its fullness, you become impenetrable to someone’s need to insult you to manage their own uncomfortable feelings.
Accountability is desperately under-supplied in our culture. The more we can nurture compassion for our humanity, which includes personal responsibility, the more we can build a culture of acceptance, inclusivity, and belonging, starting from within.
Inner happiness in life means making peace with the possibility of never receiving acknowledgment for some of the most severe injuries we confront. The peace we must make is with ourselves.
Don’t be afraid to let someone go. Sometimes resolution does not mean a return to harmony, sometimes resolution does not allow for mutual understanding, sometimes the highest and best good is to completely break a dynamic. Sometimes, even in a dynamic of struggle, we can still be trapped in enchantment with someone. Maybe it’s because we have invested so much into the relationship, maybe it’s because we are afraid of making the wrong decision, maybe we are afraid of being alone, maybe we are afraid of losing the beauty even if it comes at a high cost… Whether a relationship has outgrown its shape or is unsustainable… sometimes this can only be known through a complete unraveling of all that was. Sometimes destruction is the only option. And if it can be done with true intention for one another’s wellness, a new level of freedom can be unlocked.
Relationships are meant to be teachers. The idea that we should have everything clear and resolved in ourselves, that we should be 100% ready for partnership, are myths that keeps us from the exact medicine relationships offer. Relationships are practice grounds of possibility. When we can loosen the grip on perfection, on prescribed ideations, we can stay open to one of the most important venues for education on Earth School.
There is no true “getting away” from family. Boundaries are always healthy, but even if you remove yourself from connection with family, they live inside us, they indelibly imprint us, they are encoded into our DNA. We will hear them in our voices, we will see them in our patterns, we will meet them in the mirror. Familial healing can be done without their involvement, but it cannot be avoided if we want to break cycles and shift timelines. In fact, the closer we get to the work of intergenerational repair, the more individuated we can become (no longer vessels for their energy, their incompletions, their misdoings) – which is at the deeper heart of our quest for “breaking away.”
There is no true “getting away” from our trauma. We will destroy the planet to avoid our own pain and satiate ourselves with instant gratification, delusion, disassociation, and denial. The more we can see that trauma is unifying not fracturing, the more we can build cultures of care and healing.
Bless the defenses. Our maladaptive survival strategies can agonize us, until we gaze upon them with gratitude for what they helped us survive. They cling on so tight because the stakes were literally life-or-death, which includes psychological as well as physical. When we understand why our patterns (whether they’re self-sabotage or narcissism or avoidance) became so entrenched, we can gradually find new responses to replace those old, desperate ways with… and we show ourselves it’s ok to let go of what we had to do to make it through.
“Let me get closer to you so I can better understand” < sometimes it’s ourselves we need to say this to.
Whatever is unprocessed remains.
Relationships reveal our fears to us. The most subtle fears can collapse a situation.
We are all navigating relational trauma of some kind. My fear of abandonment is colliding with another’s fear of intimacy. And maybe we each have a bit of both.
When in doubt, speak courageously about what you’re holding. What’s living unpsoken between you and another is taking a toll. Some of my greatest relational ruptures occurred because I didn’t feel worthy enough to share my truth, when I didn’t trust that I deserved to be met in my needs.
The nervous system is one of the most potent pathways to self-love. When it physically feels good to be inside your own body because your nervous system is fortified and your ability to regulate is strong, you build a spectacular home for this journey through life.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: let things reveal themselves.
The ability to face continual deaths of the self is a liberatory technology that can serve the collective. The patriarchal linear progressive narratives, the rejection of mortality, are some of the most species-destroying forces on the planet. Jeff Bezos has not died enough. Birth and death are only traumas in a culture that has largely dissolved rites of passage.
Non-attachment is not passivity. Non-attachment is not bypassing, suppressing, ignoring, avoiding. Non-attachment is not nonchalance. It takes an incredible amount of conscious effort, steadfast discipline, spiritual integrity, and emotional maturity to continuously orient to the level of trust, release, surrender, inner peace, and acceptance that allows life to flow without clinging, expecting, projecting, or controlling.
The more present we are with each moment as it arises, the more non-attached to life (relationships, experiences, events, etc) we can become, because when you’re really paying attention, each moment is spectacularly unique. When we can embrace this truth, we see that life is a constant surprise, a continuous curiosity – whether that’s a shift in the light, a transient feeling state, a phone call, a chance encounter…
One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and each other is to cultivate a character of dignity and honor.
Remain loyal to tending the spark of collective illumination and imagination for liberation. Systems of oppression survive off suppressing our right to stewarding alternative, creative, life-affirming ways of being.
Technologies of belonging, of thriving in diverse communities, are actually cell memories of times when we lived this way, embracing our prismatic dimensionality – not illusory dreams.
Conventionality is a control mechanism organized around the simplicity of homogeneity, veiled in the arbitrary authority of purity, but it can also feel safer within and inside customs, constructs, consensus. I think we increasingly have to grapple with definitions of safety and risk. Sometimes true safety is an outcome of approaching the unfamiliar.
I’ve realized that I trust people more when they’ve struggled to be allowed “in”. “In” so often requires such a death of the soul, such an abandonment of integrity, that there is no one there to trust. The ideology has devoured the individual.
Trespass, transgress, transcend: what do you have to teach us?
When navigating transition, when crossing thresholds, when confronting a degree of transformation that intimidates us, it can be helpful to ask ourselves: who am I going to be on the other side and what’s going to help me feel _______ (light, alive, awake, vibrant, capable…)?
What are the pathways held by our higher selves? How can we merge onto those trails with more frequency until they become the norm?
Maybe if we understood cultural phenomena as bridge concepts taking us from what’s now to what’s next, we might offer ourselves a little more patience. Maybe “cancel culture” was essential given the state of the world and the devastated nature of our present reality as humans. It was one of the few resources that was successful in an environment of denial. I see these strategies as system glitches, and I am hopeful because they are dying quickly when they are outmoded and new ideas are blooming to continue the iterative process of transformation.
There is a difference between being vulnerable and being exposed.
Make space for the sentience of the unseen.
Everyone deserves to cultivate a unique intimacy with the Earth. That is our birthright. The Earth births us and holds us when we die to rematerialize us into the next incarnation and over and over again. Your intimacy with Earth is already inside you. There is no book to read, no guru to find. It’s waiting for your discovery. Earth language is a dialect each of us can learn and already knows if we lay our heads down, get low and close, be still and quiet. Learn Earth language so she knows she is heard and our trajectory can be shifted from one of extraction to expansion.
If we are asked to know something, may it be in the spirit of understanding that knowing is always changing and only temporary. Perhaps instead of knowing, we are asked to be wise.
“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.
Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”
James Baldwin
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So much wisdom. I will be sitting with and revisiting this list again and again.