No Cultural Embodiment This Week. Back Next...
A quick note and piece of cultural stimulus for my Embodiment Hour friends
Dear Friends,
I will be traveling tomorrow, Thursday, so there will be no Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa. I will be back on Thursday, June 9 with a slightly new format and a new piece of cultural stimulus.
What will the new format be? Well, I want to try something. As we discussed a couple of weeks ago in the review/critique session I hosted and some of you attended, we have a wide range of participant experience and comfort with embodiment. I love that, and I want to keep the experience open to anyone who wants to attend. This is because I believe the potential for insight and healing is profound. The more folks we have present and receptive, the more robust our collective ability to experience and metabolize the culture.
It seems like some Embodiment 101 would be helpful to us all; as a review or as new teachings. What I realized is that I can teach by modeling the process of cultural embodiment. I haven’t really done this before. Up to now, I have taken more of a classic facilitator’s role and I’ve tried to set context, but keep the space relatively neutral by not sharing too much of my experience.
The thing is…I do have a clear idea about how this is done. I do it myself. This is how I process information—cultural, relational, spiritual, worldly…whatever. And I have a lot of experience doing it. I am not saying I do it the only way or the “right” way. I can just see that by sharing my techniques, we might be able to upskill quickly as a group. I will be revealing a lot. It will be real and raw for me and it will make for a different experience. I may not do it every time, but I will definitely give it a try next week. I will then open the floor to others who want to share their experience.
Thank you for continuing along this journey with me.
What We Would Have Been Working With This Week…
So, this came to my attention today. It’s a political ad from the Democratic nominee for Senate in Kentucky, Charles Booker. Booker is the first Black man to win the nomination and he’s challenging Republican, Rand Paul. The ad is bold and contains direct references to lynching. At the end of the ad, Booker removes a noose from his own neck and says with conviction, “In November, we will choose healing.” I found it both chilling and inspiring.
Some of you know, I grew up in Kentucky. Most of my family still live there and I spend a good deal of time there. As this country’s divisions have gotten more pronounced, I’ve watched Kentucky become a battleground. Maybe it always has been…During the Civil War, Kentucky was a border state that officially declared its neutrality. By 1862 it petitioned the Union Army for protection and received it. Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd were both born in Kentucky. Early in the war Lincoln noted the strategic importance of the state, saying, “"I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game."
It’s eerie how true that still is. How we’re still living out that civil war and how Kentucky is still hanging in the balance. Trauma experts call our inability to break from from the past, “repetition compulsion.” It’s like an invisible hand that keeps enacting the same dramas, atrocities, and conflicts so that we might finally wake up and look at ourselves, see what’s truly happening, be with the truth of it, and take responsibility for the repair…the healing. So often we want to quit when we see the same shenanigans happening over and over and over (Uvalde, Buffalo, et al.). It feels futile. But the move is to really look for the deeper healing that needs to happen…to find the place where the stuckness is most dense and to bring some space, compassion, and the light of awareness there.
Booker’s declaration, “In November, we will choose healing…We will choose Kentucky,” is prophetic and a rally cry towards truth and restoration, a liberation from this stagnancy. He is up against some very formidable and entrenched evils. We shall see…I know I choose healing as often as possible. Choosing healing is the way forward…there is no other way now.
See you next week!