We began offering consultations to spiritual groups, centers, and teachers in order to share what we've learned about the particular needs moderners have that too often aren't being addressed by current teachers and spiritual centers. We have seen that both centers and teachers need education around trauma, spiritual bypassing, internalized oppressive paradigms, and much more, for their teachings to be effective and not harmful.
Spiritual centers and teachers too often de-value the relative, or human, perspective and reify the ultimate perspective - the perspective of awakening.
|
This often leads to spiritual bypassing, which occurs when practitioners or teachers use spiritual ideas or practices to avoid addressing egoic wounding. This ultimately hinders the awakening process if left unaddressed.
Most spiritual centers and teachers are uneducated about the nervous system and how spiritual practice interacts with it. When a person's nervous system is stuck in traumatic freeze, meditation* (see below) too often amplifies this tendency instead of resolving it. Traumatic freeze is a state of fearful inhibition, powerlessness, or fearful stillness - popular styles of meditation almost universally emphasize stillness or inhibition of movement. It's quite easy for practices like these to actually exacerbate dissociation, codependency, powerlessness, passivity, and depression. Unfortunately something similar can happen when a person's nervous system is stuck in fight/flight. Meditation too often sends them into freeze, rather than actually regulating their system. Fight and flight energy in the nervous system often needs uninhibited expressed movement, the expression of sound, uninhibited internal opening, or active soothing in order to regulate, but the inhibition and stillness of most forms of meditation can send the person into shutdown and dissociation. When a person's system is dealing with trauma, as most/virtually all moderner’s systems are, attention needs to be paid to the way the trauma interacts with practice. Trauma is not necessarily a disadvantage on the path, but it does require a particular skill set to best support the person on their path. |
|
Often practice re-traumatizes practitioners, either by evoking too much unresolved psychological material too fast, by recommending practitioners sit with content that is overwhelming for them, or by cultivating inhibition when disinhibition is what's really called for. This is not an exhaustive list of the ways traditional teachings and centers can be re-traumatizing, unfortunately, because this topic runs so deeply and broadly through every element of our lives, psyches, and relationships.
Additionally, all Westerners deal with particular forms of inter-generational trauma and internalized oppressive paradigms: internalized patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, fat phobia, trans-phobia, ableism, and so on. These internalized beliefs distort the sense of self and other, create undue rigidity in people's systems, and create and perpetuate harm to marginalized peoples. In addition, the process that led to these internalized beliefs (colonization/assimilation) has distorted and fragmented individual and collective resources and sources of power. These must be ‘re-membered,' or re-called and re-integrated, in order to meet our trauma and our awakening process fully.
These internalized oppressive paradigms mean that most Western systems need particular supports in order to unravel their conditioning and to awaken - such as:
Additionally, all Westerners deal with particular forms of inter-generational trauma and internalized oppressive paradigms: internalized patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, fat phobia, trans-phobia, ableism, and so on. These internalized beliefs distort the sense of self and other, create undue rigidity in people's systems, and create and perpetuate harm to marginalized peoples. In addition, the process that led to these internalized beliefs (colonization/assimilation) has distorted and fragmented individual and collective resources and sources of power. These must be ‘re-membered,' or re-called and re-integrated, in order to meet our trauma and our awakening process fully.
These internalized oppressive paradigms mean that most Western systems need particular supports in order to unravel their conditioning and to awaken - such as:
- Embodiment
- Disinhibition
- Tolerating imperfection and the messy aspects of life/our own personal manifestation
- Self-love (we mean love for the human, and also love for the particular manifestation of the separate self)
- Respect for the relative
- Enjoying pleasure
- The capacity for connection and trust
- The capacity for play, for healthy aggression, for following the body's protective impulses, for boundaries
- The capacity to rest and surrender
And so on.
The influence of these systems of oppression have distorted spiritual teachings in both overt and subtle ways - but always pervasively. They have also shaped which spiritual practices have been seen as legitimate and valuable by moderners and Westerners, and thus which practices are most popular. As a result there has been a tendency to center practices that reify harmful cultural norms and conditioning and to reject practices that feel more threatening to these internalized beliefs and ways of knowing and being.
This process of leaving out practices and views that don’t fit with the dominant cultural norms has further exacerbated the patterns described above, leaving us with a subset of spiritual tools that are interwoven with and exacerbate our collective and individual trauma. They also leave our awakening and maturation, to the extent that these are realized, brittle and shallow.
The influence of these systems of oppression have distorted spiritual teachings in both overt and subtle ways - but always pervasively. They have also shaped which spiritual practices have been seen as legitimate and valuable by moderners and Westerners, and thus which practices are most popular. As a result there has been a tendency to center practices that reify harmful cultural norms and conditioning and to reject practices that feel more threatening to these internalized beliefs and ways of knowing and being.
This process of leaving out practices and views that don’t fit with the dominant cultural norms has further exacerbated the patterns described above, leaving us with a subset of spiritual tools that are interwoven with and exacerbate our collective and individual trauma. They also leave our awakening and maturation, to the extent that these are realized, brittle and shallow.
Including feminine and indigenous wisdom allows a person's awakening to more fully flower - leaving it more robust, resilient, and deep.
|
We should say here that we are both white people, and thus, have benefited from people of color who have helped us recover our own connection to indigenous wisdom - but we do not hold the expertise many people of culture (as Resmaa Menakem says) do. So we reference and support this movement outside of dominant spiritual structures but also recommend studying with others to deepen in indigenous wisdom. Lastly, there is a lack of education around spiritual emergency - the ways it can manifest and how to work with it. We understand how to diagnose and support spiritual emergency, as well as how to proactively prevent it when possible. |
|
We address and offer education around:
And much more. |
|
*We recognize there are many many forms of meditation, and to paint all meditation practices with a broad brush would be inaccurate and potentially harmful. However, the majority of popular meditation forms in the West are practices that ask for inhibition of movement and inhibition of mind, and these are the practices we are pointing to when we use the term 'meditation' for our purposes here.
Photo by Katherine Savage
|
You cannot enter the formless state in matter... until you live love for that form. |
