I just finished the third session of Rage Club, a space where a group of people come together, held by a trained spaceholder, to practice using our anger consciously with the intention of activating our Archetypal Warrior, the Earth Guardian within us and gaining sharp clarity about what we want, what we came to this life for. In this session I had the privilege to have a teammate hold space for me to speak purely from my highest intensity anger for about a whole 4 minutes, and what came out from it was what I most deeply care about.
I'm writing this article from Chautauqua Spirited Wild, a community event put together and hosted at the Elemental Collective in an island off the northwest pacific coast of North America, in unceded territory of the T'sou Ke nation and other indigenous people. In this event people come together in a natural setting to share skills, experience community living, share natural local wild foods, play music.
What boils my blood with anger is the normalizing of the status quo that still happens even in these gatherings. It enrages me that we only get to celebrate in community for 3 days and then everyone goes home back to their ordinary life. What is happening in this event, the food sharing, the music, the skill sharing, the gathering in circle, is so unique and extraordinary, all our bodies get fed from it, the children, the mothers, the artists, the heart inside of us that longs for togetherness.
It enrages me that there are these two parts that I see that are so contradictory, one part puts on the mask of "I'm so happy, everything is ok. This is so awesome." and on the other side "I'm exhausted. I'm done with this. I'm going home." I see the switch from one side to the next happens in an instant, one moment you're "fine" and the next you're "done". And the belief seems to be that one of this mask is ok for other people to see, and the other mask is not ok for people to see. Essentially we're putting up a show for other people to believe some bullshit story or belief that we're carrying within, draining ourselves in the process, killing any possibility for being authentic.
I'm enraged for conforming with the little box that we crawl into, the little box that we managed to procure for ourselves, the little box where we hide when something doesn't fit our expectations, when things get uncomfortable. That little box is our comforts, our beliefs, our limitations, the stories that we've made about ourselves, our personal importance, etc. and is that little box what is keeping us as little disempowered people so that we don't have to face the reality of the world as a whole. What would it take for us to come out of that box together? What would it take for us not to want to crawl back to that little box? How could we come out of that little box and be ok with the reality of the world as it is, and not as we want it to be?
I'm enraged at the Positive Thinking mentality, this belief that if we think positive things will change by themselves. More and more I'm getting the clarity how this becomes just another strategy for disempowering ourselves so that we don't have to face the reality of the world, the responsibility of having 5 different bodies, a physical body, an emotional body, an energetic body, an intelectual body and an archetypal body, the responsibility of having a choice about everything that we do. Positive thinking is not going to change things by itself, embodying your bodies, gaining awareness about the different bodies that you have access to, makes it clearly not viable to just conform with positive thinking, it makes it clear that positive thinking, or "being good" becomes another unconscious battle against ourselves in the huge war of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, where nothing happens and only times passes by. I'm not promoting negative thinking, that would be just going to the other side of the dichotomy, what I'm proposing is to not conform with positive thinking as a way of creating change in your life or in the world, and to not dismiss other ways of thinking that you might consider "not positive thinking".
If this community gathering is so nurturing for us, what is stopping us from continuing this gathering for more time? what is consuming us so quickly that we can only sustain 3 days together until we're tired of each other and ready to crawl back to our little boxes? What stops us from putting our shit on the table about the real collective problems that we're facing? such as mothers and parents being insanely unsupported, members of our community living marginalized at the edges of falling through the cracks with nothing to catch them, children growing up around stressed parents isolated from other children to play and grow up with. What part of us is making it so that we normalize what is happening and not acknowledge with each other the pain and insanity of the world where we live in? Including these masks that we wear, the constant fear that we live in about being authentic, about hiding the feelings that we're feeling, about not standing in our power, about accepting our woundedness.
I'm scared to say these things, and I'm angry that nobody is saying these things, I'm happy to say these things because I want to create these bridges from my uninitiated adolescent irresponsible parts to a world where responsibility is not a burden, where our feelings and thoughts and pains are not a burden but a huge honor and privilege, to a world where adolescent humans get initiated by their village into adulthood into taking more responsibility, instead of into a cult/religion/belief, instead of perpetuating and promoting the constant state of irresponsibility and adolescence. I want a world where men grow up to adore women, where the divine feminine and masculine forces dance in collaboration with each other. This isn't to me an utopic idealistic finalized fantasy vision of the world, this is what we were made for. There are big challenges in collaboration, transformation is needed for collaboration, death is needed for transformation, clinging to our little boxes stops us from getting to any meaningful transformation.
There was a movement in this island to protect old growth trees, it was commonly known as Fairy Creek. For years a group of people came together, from a small number of people to over hundreds of people at a time, to stop the logging companies from chopping down trees that have been standing for thousands of years in ancient forests. A tribe was formed, a village was created where Earth Guardians from all over the planet came, as well as Village Weavers, systems designers (Gameworld Builders) and healers (Evolutionaries) to support the creation of the magic that was happening in this space. As it's characteristic of the adolescent irresponsible qualities of the culture where we come from, the pyramids of power started forming, with highly psychopathic personalities climbing up the chain of power to control the population of Fairy Creek. Even in these environmentalist movements, with well meant intentions, lives the corruption of the idea organizing in hierarchical forms.
As I write this article, I navigate onto unknown territory for myself, with the intention to create bridges to a territory where there are more possibilities about living a more fully authentic life, where we have possibilities of collaborating with each other, possibilities of feeding our 5 bodies. As I write this article I wonder, what is stopping me from making this togetherness happen? Beyond the excuses, beyond the reasons, what am I actually afraid of?
