TOMORROW: Cultural Embodiment @ The Stoa 6-7:30pm EST on FTX & Coming Home Meditation 9-10:15am EST
Two events tomorrow = two chances to practice embodiment in community!
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow morning we’ll meditate (see more and find link below) and tomorrow night I’ll be at The Stoa at 6pm EST for a new edition of Cultural Embodiment. As you may know, the practice is going through some important growing pains as it continues to unfold and become what it wants to be.
Through most of 2022, “Embodiment Hour” was a weekly event hosted by The Stoa in the Wisdom Gym. I decided to take a hiatus at the end of September and found that I miss it too much to put it down for good. Based on comments I’ve received from people who experienced the practice firsthand, they also missed it. What is it and what did we miss?
Cultural Embodiment is a practice of collective, embodied sensemaking where we get together and digest a current event or piece of culture with an emphasis on sensation, emotion, and feeling in the body rather than discursive thought, judgment, critique, or opinions of the mind.
What we missed while we took a break…
The chance to turn towards the news and current events in community—alone it can all feel overwhelming. But, together we can support a deeper processing and presencing of what’s happening in our world.
A place to contain my engagement with the media—I don’t like to look at the news every day. I’m also not a frequent social media user. Cultural Embodiment sessions offered a dedicated time/space for really focusing and getting the most out of my media engagement. I looked at items I might have missed or ignored. Throughout the week, if I had something arise in my awareness that felt complex or overwhelming, I parked it for our sessions.
The genuine experience of collective, embodied sensemaking—I learned so much by seeing and feeling the news and culture through others’ experience. The more diverse, the better! The more inclusive, the better! The truth is our culture is a collective collaborative creation (even when it doesn’t seem that way) and we must digest and process and integrate it together.
What will be different about tomorrow night is an aspect of “cultural composting” during the second half of the session. I always walked away from our sessions feeling nourished. It was enriching even when it was hard. I want to try to lean into this constructive and generative aspect of the practice. Like the artist, Duke Riley, whose work is pictured above, I want to make something beautiful from the trash.
As usual, we’ll come into a state of collective presence and then watch 1-2 pieces of media together and share about our embodied experience. We will bear witness to the news; feel into it; illuminate shadow and search for a deeper truth. THEN, we will sit in the field of feeling we have created. And we will see—just see—if there is some seed of wisdom that can be generated or an ember of truth that can be plucked from the ashes. Can we compost the culture and find a way to grow something new and wise from it?
I know, it’s a lot to ask in 90-minutes (better than 60!). But, I believe in us. Come! I think we’re going to make this a monthly practice, so we can continue to experiment and refine the process together.
What Will We Be Processing? Cryptocalypse! The Fall of FTX
Oh, people. Yes, we’re going to tackle the huge topic(s) of money, financial instability and anxiety, wealth inequality, the techo-elite, Twitter, the philanthropic industrial complex, youthful exuberance, greed, no accountability culture in business, and the ills of pharmacology tomorrow. A smorgasbord of dysfunction! There’s something in it for everyone!
This is a big one and an unsavory one to digest. I debated whether or not to tackle it, but it does seem to be the hottest news in the U.S. at the moment and the more I look into it, the deeper the relevancy. Whether you care about crypto or not, whether you are invested in it or not, there is a lot that needs witnessing and tending to in this story: the collapse of crypto exchange, FTX, and the immediate disenchantment with 30-year old founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, who went from golden child to a pariah overnight.
Personally, when I tune into this person and this story I feel a lot of rage. That’s the dominant feeling, along with some feelings of powerlessness, disbelief, curiosity, righteousness, schadenfreude, concern, and underneath it all…sadness. I feel very sad that this is the state of things. Oooh…and there’s one more layer…enfolding it all there is something like compassion and determination. Huh. Maybe because it feels potentially like the end of some long-running charade…and I don’t mean crypto. I mean something bigger.
If you’d like to read up on the story in advance, here are a few good articles. There are also some very intriguing and quite intense conspiracy theories on Twitter about SBF’s ties to the Democrats and money laundering through Ukraine. But, please don’t feel like you need to look at anything in advance. Don’t feel like you need to understand crypto. This session will be for everyone and anyone who is interested in turning towards this story, just one example of the perils of our fragile and corrupt systems.
NY Times: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire Collapsed
MarketWatch: You Need To Understand the FTX Debacle Even If You Have No Investments in Crypto
NPR: The downfall of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried sends shockwaves through the crypto world
Financial Times: Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall cuts off big source of funds for US Democrats
Join me and let’s feel the shock waves of this collapse in order to process some of it, bring shadow into light, and maybe compost it into something better.
Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow Morning at 9-10:15am EST ~ Awareness of the Breath
If you’d like to join my weekly embodied meditation, it’s tomorrow morning EASTERN time zone (I forgot to include the zone last week, sorry!). I think we will go back to basics and do a nice, long sit with a focus on the breath. If you’ve come to my meditations before, they can be very wide-ranging, quite visual, and sometimes journey-oriented in a shamanic fashion. I intend for this one to be quite simple and direct, but who knows! Come and find out. I’ve been doing this practice this week and it is working quickly to sharpen my awareness.