Healing ourselves and our communities from centuries of war, slavery, oppression, exploitation, greed, and abuse of our Earth is as much cultural and spiritual as it is economic and political. It is personal and collective. As one of my Buddhist teachers, Reverend angel Kyodo Williams, says, “If you can’t feel/know yourself, be in your body, you can’t be held accountable, and so there is no justice.” White supremacy, and every flavor of social and environmental domination, has taught us to be disembodied. Our culture has conditioned us to leave our bodies and ignore the harm we cause, and thus the physical and emotional trauma imposed on others and ourselves. In particular, Americans’ vaunted “can do” attitude has allowed us to pave over the “external” costs of our exploitation, extraction, and poisoning of the earth, and our mistreatment of each other. Such domination and brutality separates us from our ancestors and accompanying spiritual resources. It was inevitable that we now face increasing anxiety, depression, and dysfunction in the face of our mega-crisis.
One of the grand ironies of self-centered capitalism is that it gets you to forget yourself, most everything but your own ego and material needs and desires. We need to practice returning to ourselves, to feeling, to our open nimble minds, and to who we are and what we’re about. Doing that we can discern where justice and wellbeing are and how best to pursue them.
Another Buddhist teacher of mine, therapist Dr. Kesha Fikes, suggests willing our own vulnerability, and practicing what she calls “extimacy,” or opening to our violent (broadly defined) histories in ways that affect us intimately. These histories can include everything from our often dehumanizing education system to the murdering of innocent unarmed BIPOC by the police. There are many different creative activities, therapies, and spiritual practices for doing this. Different means work for different people. To name just two which I am personally familiar with, mindfulness meditation and peer co-counseling, we can use these to cut through the denial of our fear, anger, and shame. Through different techniques, these practices give us permission to explore and take charge of emotions and awarenesses that we often suppress, sometimes for valid practical reasons, but which then keep us from knowing ourselves and our motivations. Racist, misogynist, ableist, and transphobic behaviors can trigger and perpetuate such ignorance. Without employing healing practices, that ignorance can remain in charge of our decisions and actions aimed at restoring justice, and make them ineffectual. To return to Rev. angel, “If you can’t feel/know yourself, be in your body, you can’t be held accountable, and so there is no justice.”
I’m not suggesting we wait until we each are completely self-aware before we demand and work for systemic change. Given our perpetual human imperfection, that’s hardly realistic. But we need to develop habits of holding ourselves accountable to our most compassionate, generous, and sharpest thinking selves. We can be fostering our own personal clarity, open-mindedness, and creativity while crafting more effective strategies for broad transformative change. And the more personal practices I’m describing, among many others, can facilitate and support, and in fact are indispensable to, collective practices like the most creative and effective direct action, interest-based negotiation, community conflict resolution, truth and reconciliation processes, citizens’ assemblies, and participatory budgeting.
As activists, we are constantly trying to hold those in power accountable to the parts of themselves that, in at least some of them, reflect our finest shared qualities as a people, e.g., empathy, kindness, humility, generosity, a sense of justice. Through our own daily experiences, we know how challenging it can be to remember ourselves and consistently act on those traits. Our culture constantly tempts us to get ours first, reject criticism, and take over. If we are not practiced in reclaiming our best selves, we cannot hope to persuade those at the so-called “top,” and other fellow citizens, to do so. Without personal, lived, embodied accountability, there is no justice.
