MY FRAMEWORK
Here's a brief explanation of the frameworks that inform my practice, including what vision I subscribe to of a more beautiful world.
WHY RADICAL?
Because intra-personal liberation nurtures cultural revolution.
When individuals are able to relate to themselves, one another, and the world from a core of love, respect, and gratitude, we will collectively create social, economic, and political systems that reflect our values for the well-being of all life.
So my aim is to help people transform and embody...
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beliefs about yourself and others from limiting to liberating.
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a story from separate to connected.
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an experience from unworthy to lovable.
As citizens of a neo-liberal, white-hetero-patriarchal society, most of us have been conditioned to believe that we (especially POCI folks) are just cogs in a productivity machine — that we don’t really matter, our needs aren’t important, and we have to sacrifice our true pleasure and wellbeing to be accepted and belong.
We have internalized this story of self-as-separate and forgotten how to fully connect with life. This keeps us from being our most authentic, creative, passionate, rabble-rousing selves, as well as (sometimes severely) limiting our capacity for empathy, compassion, and collective responsibility.
It takes a radical level of presence, empathy, generosity, and vulnerability to liberate our hearts from the illusion of separation that creates our collective suffering of loneliness, scarcity, shame, and violence.
Let us meet the pain with compassion, judgment with acceptance, fear with love, doubt with curiosity!
You belong to this life and deserve to feel and sense beyond your logical doubts that you are more than worth tremendous love, regardless of your so-called productivity, attractiveness, intelligence, sexuality, heritage, gender, or any other socially constructed measure.
From there, you can show up with courageous authenticity and genuine kindness for your relationships and help create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
ROOTED IN LIBERATION PSYCHOLOGIES
Western psychology has mostly presented itself as a universal, objective science, presenting Eurocentric perspectives as facts. Historically, the academic discipline of Western psychology has been complicit in the establishment of colonial, neo-colonial, hetero-normative, and globalized hierarchies of oppression. Within the discipline are many diverse voices resisting and revising the field by articulating and developing liberation psychologies. Here is a quick summary of points that speak to me and help orient my practice.
Psychological work exists within a paradigm of interdependence.
Culture and psyche, self and community, self and nature co-create each other.
Priority is given to what or who has become marginalized both in psyche and society.
Practices of empowerment and participation attempt to challenge the dominant hierarchies of power in the world and psyche.
Carefully question who and what our ideas will serve in any given context.
Inspirations, practices, and meanings that emerge from imaginative, artistic, religious, and spiritual practices are invaluable.
Articulation of these points came from a resource titled "Liberation Psychologies: An Invitation to Dialogue" by Dan Hocoy, Aaron Kipnis, Helene Lorenz, and Mary Watkins.
A MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD
A Declaration of the Four Sacred Things
The Earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance; only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.
To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices.
To this we dedicate our lives.
– Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing