this newsletter was going to be about meditation and why i encourage people to try it and see if it works for them. more broadly, it was going to be about why i stay preaching about doing whatever we can to maintain a nourished spirit. and why i think meditation is a highly effective spiritual tool. it might’ve briefly touched on the proliferation of the white american spirituality industry and how i think it dulls the potency of meditation because it removes it from any true spiritual context. but then roe v wade happened and i thought, eh, why speak under the guise of something else? at the end, i’ll get back into why i still meditate at almost 23 & why i am so passionate about meditation but first, let’s get into the meat of message sans niceties.
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it is possible and necessary to do things differently in this country. and this world. but for those of in the u.s., let’s start here, in the belly of the beast. there is an achievable future that is anticapitalist, anti-imperialist—a future in which, as julius k. nyerere puts it, society’s happiness is not based on “exploitation of man by man.” or as the black socialists in america put it, a society in which things like hierarchy and capitalism are not seen as an immovable givens.
intelligent mischief wisely notes that any movement needs all of us. whenever i reflect with this in mind, the need that rings loudest is: who is making sure our spirits are not broken? how can we make sure our spirits are not broken? that the important work of (and i’m just going to quote Dr. Ayesha Khan) “consistently building cross-community solidarity between multiple disenfranchised working-class communities, mutual aid infrastructure, & constructing dual-power community-based alternatives to meet our needs without relying on the state” can be sustained without repeating the same harm of the broken-spirited society we live in?
what’s the harm of a broken spirit? well, it’s what makes man exploit man. a broken spirit is the root cause of one little affliction becoming a cycle of afflictions. aka the current sick, sad, society we live with. and here, affliction means the ways in which we hold and act out of things like shame or judgment or lack; or our belief that we are better or worse than others (non-humans included). affliction means anything that denies love. love makes everything that comes after it possible. it makes our drive to act in ways that do not harm others possible. it makes our patience to build with others possible. without love, the world becomes dark. a hum of hopelessness becomes the undercurrent.
many of the questions organizers pose often start with, what i’d consider, spiritual questions. i say they’re spiritual because engaging your own spiritual process, means interrogating what you consider the basics of life on a spiritual level. this is one of the key ways you can re-trace humanity’s steps. it is the process that makes you question hierarchies & extremes like capitalism because it requires a discipline of questioning why you feel the way that you feel, why you act the way that you act, what in society has taught you to be that way, and how you might change the aspects that cause you, others, and the planet harm.
the process also makes it increasingly obvious that society requires you to have a broken spirit to maintain the status quo. for many, a broken spirit is just a symptom of circumstance. if you are struggling to survive, struggling to gain/maintain basic human rights, your survival requires you to engage a system that is built to keep you disconnected and everyone around you is also forced into doing the same—how the fuck would you not have a broken spirit? when you analyze it this way, the value of organizing towards no spirit broken is made clear.
i find it grounding to remember this: our current society is, simply, trying to break our spirits in every way. that means the solutions are not as complex as we may often think either. complicated to get to, yes. but not complex in their nature.
the black socialists in america thread continues on and eventually says,
Our organization is asking you (and many others) to confront it with us, with the assumption that you want a better life than what you have now. With the assumption that you want to be free
similarly, when i try to engage people on the spiritual process, i am assuming that we all want a better life than we have now, and that we all want to be free. i’m assuming that we don’t want to feel shame for not fitting into a societal binary and that we don’t want to constantly question if we have value. i’m hoping we don’t believe that this is the only outcome of evolving to have consciousness. i don’t think it is. isn’t the upside of humans evolving to have consciousness that we can always choose some other way?
if we want a better life and we want to be free, questions like: why do you feel someone is better or worse than you? how would you feel if you released the deep belief that it’s true? what if, every day, you committed believing that is not true?” are simple pathways toward a nourished spirit. that does not mean they are easy pathways. they require practice and commitment and work. they must be asked and answered again and again. these questions help rewrite your internal code and reprogram what society has taught you. these questions connect you to all life. they reintegrate you with the universe. the black socialists in america have this line about working towards what “allows humans to be in symbiosis with non-human nature.” from these questions, the politics become more resonant. to ever achieve and maintain a system that supports this, we need to make sure our spirits are strong enough to not let our afflictions tear it apart.
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a quick example: i love the book the mushroom at the end of the world by anna tsing. in it, she talks about how capitalism requires people to be alienated from one another, themselves, others that are non-human, and the planet itself so that humans, plants, rocks, etc. can be commodified and sold until exhaustion. then after a resource has been destroyed from extreme use, a new resource is found and the cycle repeats. thus destroying the planet and the lives held within it.
now, what she wrote helped a lot of light bulbs go off when i first read it. but in my day-to-day life, i still felt like others were better than me and worse than me. i felt the shame/judgment that comes with feeling separated from others in that way. i still felt “nature” was separate from me though, in general, i had gratitude towards the earth. i felt the pain of unmanaged consciousness while gaining more and more awareness of how shitty society is. even armed with a better understanding of political theory, i felt hopeless and powerless. and i lacked any true belief/faith that it could be some other way. all this made me feel even more shame and judgment. my spirit was broken and i was rendered useless to the cause.
it was only after spiritual questioning led me to learn me humility that the true potency of what anna tsing (and many other authors) wrote resonated down to my bones. how could it not? when you free yourself from the weight of separation, the weight of made-up binaries, made-up accolades, made-up beauty standards, made-up nation-states, etc., etc., etc., it makes it easier to be. it makes it easier to love and be loved. it makes you realize that we evolved to have consciousness and that there are many ways to use it outside of what we’ve been given. once you experience being without these made-up “givens,” a better life is no longer theory to be read.
at the end of the day, people thinking that hierarchies and capitalism are givens is at its core a spiritual issue. to be disconnected from others to that extreme is a spiritual issue as much as it is a political one. and america operates almost exclusively in extremes. we must see always society’s systems of hierarchy for what they are: made up, arbitrary and very much able to be changed. spiritual organizing, then, means taking actions that specifically engage your community on spiritual questions and give them tools to deepen their relationship to their spiritual process with the belief that it strengthens and is integral to the possibility + sustainability of all other organizing.
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i’ve been really into meditation since i was about sixteen years old. i was drawn to the idea that i could escape the feelings of anxiety and depression that came with growing up on social media (i’ve been on socials since i was ten years old! and, now, that’s nothing compared to the generation coming behind me). i started my spiritual process at a similarly young age (eleven) which often led me to study bits and pieces of buddhist writings as best as i could as a head-too-full, busybody teenager with a dim outlook on life. meditation teachers offered me space away from all my thoughts. for 15-20 minutes, i could leave society life, my body—the idea of a separate and separated self behind.
of course, i didn’t have the language for this when i was younger or even the full understanding of how meditation was transmuting what i had been indoctrinated with and all the stains it left on my subconscious. i just knew that i liked being still, being quiet, and noticing the world with more and more attention until, at some point, i was so at ease that it felt as though there were no more distinctions.
i really believe spirituality is for everyone. i like how Runjhun Noopur puts it,
Ultimately, ideal spiritual zenith maybe just that, an ideal. But it is an ideal worth aspiring for in the sense the closer we get to it, the better the quality of our life and general existence becomes. Spirituality is not a dream reserved for Dervesh and ascetics. It is out there, up for grabs for anyone who is willing to give it a try. Achieving the zenith may be far fetched, but then achieving it may not be the point after all. And that is exactly what the idea of Ishq within the spiritual realm stands to remind us.
meditation is one of those things that made me believe spirituality was for everyone. i started with random free youtube meditations. as i learned what did and didn’t work for me, i got into tara brach’s free meditations that are conveniently shared on youtube and podcast apps. by eighteen, i found it easier to just meditate on my own (also free). now, i do a mix of everything. meditation has always been my most accessible spiritual tool. it was my gateway drug!
at 23 (almost, i’m three weeks away), i think meditation is a nice way to reintegrate with the universe. it’s a trans process and i believe trans processes are always key to any way forward. because they reject extremes. they reject binaries. they are fundamentally the same as life; they are rooted in fluidity, creativity, and change. more literally, meditation is a transpersonal process. meaning, it helps you transcend the limits of the personal/individual and reintegrates your being with the whole. if we want a better life and we want to be free, reintegrating with the universe (read: re-tracing humanity’s steps) is not a bad tool to have in our toolbox.
i’ll leave it here for now and close out with a favorite poem by mary oliver.
What I Have Learned So Far:
by Mary Oliver
Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.
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some reads:
the heart of the prajnaparamita sutra
what’s your love language channel on are.na by chakra
viv spirale channel on are.na by me lol
aaaaaaand, i made a guided meditation around reintegrating with the universe:
avèk tout kè m [with all my heart]
sienna
your writing is so soothing