FEATURED BLOG POSTS

LOVE IS OUR WATER, NOT A REWARD TO BE WITHHELD OR EARNED✨

If we ever treated plants like we treat humans most people would think we were insane. Is the house plant you forgot to ever water all wilted and nearly dead? “Must have been it’s own fault, it should have stored more water and thought ahead! It got what it deserved!” Did a milling corporation cut off most of your tree’s root system? “It must have a personal disease and problem. All trees should be able to able to absorb nutrients just fine!” Have a rosebush that just won’t seem to grow in the shade because your neighbor’s new fence is blocking out all of its light? “That rosebush got itself into that situation. It shouldn’t have planted itself in that environment!”

All of these examples of course seem absolutely crazy to us. But this is the exact attitude too many of us use on ourselves and others as soon as those plants, water, soil, and sun turn into humans, love, and all of our other most basic human needs. Living in a culture that frames everything as needing to be “earned” and “deserved,” that rips us all from remembering our irrevocable interconnectivity to each other and the environments we are expressions of, it is no wonder that we have hyper individualized and moralized conceptions of success and failure. “If someone is doing well it’s because they earned it. If someone is doing poorly they obviously didn’t!”

The fatal flaw with this fragmented moralization of human flourishing and struggle is that it abandons the very truths we would never even think to question in nature...

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh

WHY I ACTIVELY SEEK TO DISCOVER HOW I'M WRONG✨

Have you ever been so sure about something, and then later completely changed your mind because something changed you, and thus your perception? Whether you had an experience that disproved your previous ideas about reality or you stumbled upon new information that helped you understand a previously missing piece in your working model of “how things are,” what allows us to expand our awareness along with this ever-changing truth about reality is our genuine wholehearted devotion to know the full breadth and depth of any given facet of reality ABOVE our attachment/addiction to being right.

So why is it so hard for us to admit, not to mention actively seek, to uncover where and when we have held false or incomplete ideas about reality? Because from birth we have been taught that being right means being worthy of love and respect, and being wrong means being disqualified from both. So we avoid being wrong like the plague. Yet, as #TerranceMcKenna pointed out so aptly, “If you don’t contradict yourself your position isn’t complex enough.” Because really, each of us only holds a piece of the puzzle of reality and none of us can hold all of the pieces (only True-Source+God/Creator-Consciousness can see and feel the whole mosaic of multidimensional reality, both fully experiencing it and witnessing it simultaneously outside of time and within everything in time).

So unless we are willing to love ourselves unconditional of being right and humble ourselves to that which is outside of our inherently limited boxes of reality, we will never see reality as the multi-dimensional, ever-changing horizon that it is. For even if our ideas about “how things are” were previously true, that doesn’t mean they were ever the full picture we thought it to be... For as a Zen proverb says, "Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening”✨

DEAR BROTHERS: MY FEMINISM IS ALSO FOR YOU✨

As one of many heart-centered intersectional feminists whose sacred activism encompasses a deep empathy and logical evaluation of the effects of patriarchal systems on ALL people and all parts of life, I don't only acknowledge, but FEEL the interconnectivity of us all: when my brothers suffer; I suffer too. Contrary to popular belief, issues like circumcision, male rape, abuse, and suicide, to cycles of violence, male-disposability, and war, to the dominion, exploitation, and destruction of our Mother Earth are feminist issues that have deep patriarchal underpinnings (read more in the comments below this post).

You see, unlike its fear based portrayals, feminism is NOT about reversing all gender roles to "even the score," dis- or over- powering men the way the patriarchy has to women (an "eye for an eye" is actually a patriarchal idea), or throwing away all embodiments of gender expression (genetically inherent, spiritually dominant, or culturally constructed). It is about rationally and empathetically analyzing which patriarchal beliefs, systems, and social constructs limit, pressure, and shame us all (as the diverse spectrum of humanity we actually are) into singularly acceptable ways of being and seeing in the world that do not individually nor collectively serve us to attempt to alter ourselves to fit into.

Additionally, I think it is ESPECIALLY important to note that the patriarchy is not some plotting group of men seeking to oppress women; it is a collectively believed way of seeing and being in the world, that, when invisibly internalized, constrains and harms the believer, as much as those that believer effects. Many who perpetuate the patriarchy can be well meaning in intent, while their actions still harm. The patriarchy is NOT about evil people, but culturally pervasive, toxic ideas that effect us all. This is where my feminism so seeks to help: to bring awareness to the limitations that we have unknowingly internalized, so that the power to be who we really are can be placed back into our hands. You are all so important to me too, my brothers. And that's why I'm a feminist✨

LEADERSHIP IS MODELING LOVE TO YOURSELF IN ALL FORMS✨

I use to think as Ernest Hemingway once proclaimed that, "there is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." And while that sentiment holds a lot of truth, it forgets the fundamental re-membering that both your former and future incarnated selves (which at the most ultimate level is ALL OF US) are also you. This is the deeply loving truth that Yeshua / Jesus lived his life through: that because everyone was him living through the filters of forgetfulness, everything he did to another, he literally did to himself. This is why he taught so passionately, "as you do onto others you do onto me."

So what does that radical re-membering look like in my practical day to day? Humbling myself to the divinity of others over and over again. For while the golden rule of "do into others as you would have them do onto you" might work if we were all here to learn the same lessons and we required the same catalysts for growth. The truth is that what might be most beneficial for me on my path, might be harmful for you on yours. So to honor the individuality of our soul's needs and current forms, I prefer to use the alternative of, "Do onto others as their higher self / Christ Consciousness would do onto them." Which I have always found looks like deeply respecting the choices of others, loving them right where they are, and trusting the path they have chosen for their highest growth, no matter if it makes no sense to me.

While the ex-evangelical and activist in me still struggles to lay down my converting arms, my heart just bursts open more and more with every bow I give to myself in forms I once could never even look at. For while I once believed that by loving another who was acting out in harm, I was condoning their choices. I have found that most make such harmful choices because they lack the very love I thought would increase their acting out. The greatest help we can give to others is thus not in aiming to "convert them" to some highest state, but to help them remember what love looks like through us✨

WHY COLLECTIVE LIBERATION IS THE ONLY LIBERATION✨

Until our ideas about self-preservation recognize our fundamental unity and interconnection with everyone and everything, our cut-off isolationist (mis)perceptions of self-preservation will always lead to our collective demise. As Charles Eisenstein (@charles_eisenstein) explains in Climate: A New Story, “We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.”

And what has this cultural mythology created? Our systemic and personal heart-mind disconnection from everyone and everything. We buy “cheap” fast fashion clothing made with neonicitoid (the pesticide linked to bee die off) laden gmo cotton that’s workers bear the true cost of with their lives of indentured servitude... “because it doesn’t effect ME.” OR We invest our retirement accounts into oil stocks and mega corporations to see our investments grow... “because it only effects ME.” Never realizing how powerfully our collective actions ripple to effect the whole, and how just as powerfully that whole comes back to effect us.

We might naturally assume that selfishness is to blame. But I propose that a LACK of selfishness is at the root. You see, because our very definitions of “the self” have become fragmented, we have dually forgotten that our true SELF is everyone and everything. For the same infinite consciousness that came into the limitation/focus of your individuated form in this incarnation is the same consciousness within every other being and life form on this earth. So let us ask ourselves, is a man who cuts off his arm to disconnect from the pain of a cut selfish or rather grossly disconnected from the unity he holds with his arm? The sooner we can remember the infinite organism that we are the sooner we can begin to re-member and heal all of our parts✨