We do this work to become more Human

Re-educating the BodyMindSoul free from Racism

 

This movement based work starts from our humanity, our instinct, breath, eye contact, awareness of life purpose, heart energy, rather than starting from the wound.  If our relationships and identity are defined by the wound, “we are anti-racist activists,” it can limit the work and our relationship to the work.  But our humanity, breath, eye contact, instinct, heart, spiritual information all existed before the invention of race, focusing on them rehumanizes us, and from that place we have more resource to heal a system of racism that reflects the unhealing inside us and inside those who created the system.  At this point most white people are not healed enough to recognize what white culture does not provide, and one of our privileges is to not have to witness and know about other cultures in order to be considered valuable to the dominant culture.  This has allowed racism to sustain over time and our own humanity to remain underdeveloped.

 

How Racism Interrupts Wholeness for White People (People Given Systemic Power)

 

Feeling superiority directly cancels out gratitude, the most healing vibration of heart energy.  Dependence on a sense of security from a hierarchical power system can create a deep persistent fear in the third chakra, the power/identity chakra.  This can create a deep desire to separate oneself from someone who has less, a “have-not,” an untouchable, in order to convince oneself of having something or of being in touch with ourselves.  But this cannot fully substitute for a true sense of spiritual power when we clearly know our soul path and have a genuine curiosity and suspicion about our own defensiveness.

 

The fear we are experiencing with the economy of 2009, is not about survival alone, but the survival of our power systems and our identity that depends on them.  Poverty is not a new thing, but the people who have been desensitized to it no longer can be.  The amount of fear is not just a fear about losing money, but losing our immunity to this pain, losing our identification as separate from the poor.  When we see a man on the street asking for money, unafraid of being poor, if nothing else we can respect his courage.  It is something he has and we often “have-not.”  Earning money is not the same spiritual work as releasing fear about losing money.

 

Just now as I am writing this, a man comes to speak with me.  He has just completed a retreat with Deepak Chopra in New Orleans.  He tells me after Katrina the homeless became the guides because they had the experience in how to survive with nothing.

 

We are living in a time of redefining wealth.  The value of economic wealth is not a sustainable value. It was invented by humans, as was race, and now as the economy is becoming obsolete we must invent new things.

 

“[R]ecession has become the mother of invention,” the New York Times posts on it’s front page, Saturday, March 14, 2009.  We invented things before money and race and we will invent the next phase, and we have the power to invent what will heal us.  This is the dissolving of a hierarchy about who is important and it’s a hierarchy that is not soul based, and can never sustain over the test of time and evolution.

 

Because the economy and other power systems are not Soul based or Body based their construction exists primarily in Mind consciousness.  Our dominant culture promotes the Mind in domination of the BodySoul to sustain this mindbased reality.  As a yoga and meditation teacher I see the symptoms of this everyday.  It has changed our learning process and our receptivity.  Experience co-exists in the BodyMindSoul.  But information only exists in the Mind.  When our Mind seeks information more than experience it censors our learning ability and our self knowledge. We diminish the work to the description of the work.  So we get to learn about ourselves rather than being in conscious self existence.  

 

Our health depends on the much more than an identity that does not challenge our thought culture.  Our health depends on the immune system, digestive system, imagination system, ancestral system, emotion system, erotic system, soul power system, forgiveness/acceptance system, communication system.  This lists reflects the intelligence of the chakra system.  All of these systems expand beyond the mind and the dominant culture which has enslaved the mind by casting it as master.  

 

In our dominant culture teaching the mind to release its dominance, it’s thought traffic, has become an industry of meditation.  That’s how our wealth consciousness acknowledges the imbalance in our BodyMindSoul relationship.  I recently saw an advertisement for an expensive cruise to take Americans to Jamaica for spiritual growth, to relax on the tourist beach and learn meditation.  Yet the healing and reintegration is more than a consumable retreat, it’s here inside and has always been and it needs us reciprocally.  The universe wants to heal through us and will create nothing less than catastrophes to remind us we are not in control.  But we are powerful, powerful enough to remember we belong here with each other.

 

Restoring the economy will not be part of the evolution, any more than getting back hours at my job will not make me less expendable to my employer.  The economy is expendable to our spiritual human development.  When we trust that, the fear will dissolve along with the power systems it is protecting.  We mistake their familiarity for comfort, and even comfort is expendable to transformation.

 

How Racism Interrupts Wholeness for People Who’s Power is Not Recognized by the System

 

Feeling inferiority can collapse, fragment, or rigidify the energy system.  This interrupts communication within the BodyMindSoul system and also communication between people, generations, and cultures, depriving humanity of the creativity and collaboration with that soul, that distinct channel of source.  It is no coincidence that the physical language of Hip Hop speaks collapse, fragment (isolate), and rigidify(freeze) in the most masterful storytelling.  The mastery and the healing are the same, are part of the universe evolving as it recognizes more than the dominant culture and the spiritual segregation we have invented by teaching each other we are separate nervous systems.

 

Love,

Zahava