on revolutionary love
it's a weekday night, you're scrolling on your phone after an uneventful, unfulfilling day. you don't want to go to sleep because you want to have some time for yourself before starting another day full of doing things you don't want to do. you don't want to be here.
how did we, collectively, as humanity, get here? how did we get to a place where so many of us are living in a waking haze, rushing ourselves from one thing to the next, without even the breathing room to notice where we are, who we are, and what matters to us?
the matrix we currently exist in preys on our instinctual nature as primates to fear uncertainty, change, and death and chase after pleasure. momentary dopamine hits from scrolling on social media, achievements made up of our own hubris, and intense chemical concoctions in processed food get us through the dearth of actually nourishing human interaction.
I don't know about you, but it often feels hard to come by for me: true face-to-face connection, where we are not only safe to be who we honestly are, but our true selves are celebrated, valued, and we have the space to express ourselves and play and connect and feel seen and heard in an authentic way.
this morning I prayed to be supported in integrating my spiritual practice into my daily life. I ended up listening to a podcast conversation between Tara Brach and Valerie Kaur, in tears on my the subway back home from dance class.
The conversation was about "revolutionary love" - being able to look any stranger in the eye and feel about them "you are a part of me I don't yet know." I thought of the impossibility I feel around embodying that, especially towards all the people that don't see me as a human being, that I don't feel safe around. mostly, men. but I realize here that I also have a hard time seeing them as human, and this perspective keeps me trapped in an illusion of separation, one in which they are the enemy and it's us vs them.
instead, consider the liberatory potential of cultivating the capacity to exercise curiosity and openness about why they are acting the way they are. which can be excruciatingly difficult, of course, and involves an emotional process that can't be bypassed. because the emotions you feel about being hurt, excluded, or disregarded are real and human and deserve to be addressed. you don't have to bypass the steps of feeling valid in your trauma, in your hurt, your ANGER GRIEF RAGE FRUSTRATION, in order to get to a place where you're all-forgiving and all-understanding of anything and everything harmful that has ever happened.
rather, it's a collective action of turning towards dark places within ourselves, and within each other, that we are all playing different roles in over time. ie, there's a time and place to just need to breathe and tend to your wounds without feeling the obligation to understand and forgive the exploitative energetic violence being perpetrated when you see bodies of children under rubble on the news, or when your existence is threatened just for being different.
there's someone else more resourced who is playing the role of extending an olive branch towards the "perpetrators" and seeing them and their wounds with compassion. or at least, I can hope we're moving towards a place where we're beginning to center this process as a collective.
and the power to be present with one another in community is what supports us in this collective process of moving towards revolutionary love, where we can hold each other with tenderness no matter what side we're on.
in order to have the inner strength to view others with this expansive perspective, we need to be resourced, in the sense that we must meet our primal needs to gather with our communities and laugh together, and see each other. feel the joy of being alive together...
and not to be half-satiating ourselves with substitutions of the real thing, yaknow?
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