Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa Tomorrow at Noon EST ~ Post Roe

Can we hold the issue of reproductive rights with nuance and compassion?

Dear Friends,

Tomorrow at noon EST we will gather for Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa. Every week, we take in a piece of culture that is alive, electric, and important to our sense-making and meaning-making in this moment. It’s a space where we experience the culture through an embodied and collective lens. I see it as a place where we can take a good look in the mirror that is our culture in this moment; as an antidote to apathy.

I like to think it is also a space where nuance, confusion, conflict, paradox, and honest reckoning are welcomed. This is what I set out to create…a place where we can understand ourselves better through the media we consume and create.

Each week, the selection of the topic is a big task for me. I have help (thank you, Ari, for being my guide here). I’ve learned that I have to be clear within myself on the topic in order to hold and facilitate an open and unconditional space for inquiry. In a sense, I created Cultural Embodiment to ensure I wouldn’t check out or become apathetic to the media and a culture that is persistently disappointing and disheartening. Because I am accountable to this weekly ritual and feel companionship with those of you who attend, I turn towards what is happening and I try to be with the difficulty that comes with that. I usually know what the topic for the week should be when I encounter resistance in myself.

This week I feel a lot of resistance and I know it’s the right topic.

The issue wanting to be witnessed this week is the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. This topic is loaded politically, religiously, culturally, and personally for many people. For me it touches some deeply uncomfortable places. I can already sense into the fear…I dare say, terror…that arises in what feels like a stripping of my rights and a persecution of my power and agency as a woman. I can also sense a deep despair that something that should never have become a matter of politics or policy has been so deeply politicized that we can hardly imagine a way of working through it that is compassionate, communal, and non-political anymore. I also sense rage within me when I take in the possibility that there has been an orchestrated and strategic effort to control.

I also sense a hope…more like a prayer…that something good could arise from this that forces us into a reckoning with the sacredness of sexuality, consent, embodied relating, reproduction, birthing, support for families, new ways of being in community, the recovery of an intimacy with our bodies and cycles that has been lost. I feel sadness as I write this and also resolve. How will I ensure that my own 12-year old daughter has a clear and strong sense of her body, her boundaries, her desires; respect for the miracle that she can produce life, and also that her choices and her freedom matter? This feels to me like a generational exchange of feminine wisdom that has been lost, outsourced, and medicalized for too long.

I am not saying it’s easy or clear. I am saying that we’re so far down the wrong path and so polarized now that it’s hard to even feel the nuance in the issue. It’s hard to feel that there can be regret, pain, and reluctance in the position of pro-choicers and there can be mercy and care in the position of pro-lifers. Definitely, a lot of the language around it all is wrong. How does it feel to read that? Maybe your own position on the issue is strong. I respect that and invite it. Maybe your position is complicated or there’s tension within you…I respect and invite that, too. Can we be in a greater, more inclusive awareness? Can we hold the possibility of healing on this issue? Can we release even a little of the tension in the issue by holding it with an open hand and letting the story that’s unfolding surprise us? I don’t know, but I am eager to try with you.

I do know this: There is tremendous healing power in just witnessing what is actually happening.

Here is a helpful framing clip from Rachel Maddow on the history of the politicization of the issue. We will look at this clip tomorrow along with another clip circulating on social media.