Last week, a young woman walked into my cozy straw bale office, dropped into a comfy chair, and told me how utterly overwhelmed she is. Tears formed in her eyes from the sheer relief of finding a place to sit in quiet, and be held and heard with love.

A day later, another walked in with despair in his eyes; he told me how depressed and hopeless he feels about the state of the world. When I gently asked him if he had found an activist group to get involved with, he shook his head sadly. His thoughts spoke louder than his voice: What’s the point? Nothing works.

Many more clients tell me that they are so busy just trying to raise their children and pay their bills that they don’t even have time to think, much less figure out how to change the trajectory of our country.

This is what power loss looks like.1 We are suffering from power loss on a massive scale.

Look. Our concept of power is corrupted by a society built on domination. When I say that we are suffering power loss, I do not mean that we should put up our fists and fight to take power from others. That concept of power is extractive: like pie, if I take a piece, it means less for you. That concept of power is what the oligarchs use.

“Power Within” (our internal, felt sense of power to create in our world), and “Power-With” (the way power within multiplies when we find a group of people to co-create with) are unlimited sources of energy, like the sun. (Shout out to for these crucial concepts.)

So, Power With and Power Within are renewable energy sources. And yet, we are allowing the greediest, most violent people in the world to siphon off our power without replenishing it, just as we allow them to extract nature’s other gifts without giving back.

How are you giving away your power? In a moment, I’m going to ask you to do a “personal power audit.” To get you warmed up, consider just three choice points that show up every day, for every one of us:

1. Your relationship to inner knowing. When you wake up in the morning, do you move immediately into the busy-ness and noise, gulping coffee while scrolling through news that leaves you horrified? Or do you carve out even a few minutes of silence to turn inward and listen to what you know, what you feel, what you need, and what you can do about it? Power Within begins with the radical act of treating your own inner knowing as a precious source of wisdom that is far more worth consulting than a screen that is making some big man a profit.

2. Your relationship to the living Earth. When you walk outside for the first time in your day, do you treat the Earth as scenery, as the backdrop to the grand human drama? Or do you pause, even for a few breaths, and feel the ground beneath your feet as someone alive, someone who knows your name? What might it mean to greet the Earth in the way you'd greet a beloved elder: with gratitude, and with the genuine question, "What can I give to you today?" (Thank you to , whose recent workshop at Ghost Ranch inspired this question.)

3. Your relationship to human community. When your day winds down or the weekend opens up and you feel a desire to connect with people, do you take the convenient way and reach for your social media or the TV remote (which generates profit for the oligarchy - this is precisely why it is so “convenient”)? Or, do you prioritize seeing people in person, having real conversations, showing up to the things that actually build the world you want to live in?

My friends! No matter how challenging our individual lives are, we can treat every moment, every day, as a precious opportunity to protect, expand, and engage our power in service of all life.

A Practice and a Challenge: The Daily Personal Power Audit

If you suspect you are one of the many who are slowly giving away our power, try this for the next week. Journal on these questions each morning or evening:

1. Where did I give my power away today? Consider inner power, relationship to the Earth, and relationship to community. (Hint: look for moments in your day when you felt deadened, deflated, numb, exhausted.) What did it cost me, physically, emotionally, spiritually?

2. Where did I embody or expand my power today? Consider inner power, relationship to the Earth, and relationship to community. (Hint: look for moments when you felt vibrantly alive, connected, in alignment with your truth, playful, joyful, expansive). What did it give me, physically, emotionally, spiritually?

3. What is one thing I will do differently tomorrow?

I would love to hear your reflections and questions on this practice. Please share them in the comments so that others can learn from you as well.

Leave a comment

Oct. 23-25: An Opportunity to Take a Deeper Dive into Reclaiming Your Power

If this exploration of how we give our power away — and how we can reclaim it in service of all life — resonates with you, I want to tell you about an opportunity I’ve been building to address this precise challenge. It is particularly oriented toward people who love nature, who want to take a deeper dive into reclaiming their power, and who are ready for spiritual adventure.

This October, I’m offering a retreat in the high desert of southwest Colorado:

Shamanism in Times of Death and Rebirth: An Introduction to Shamanic Journeying and Sacred Circle Ways
October 23-25, Mancos, Colorado

Space is limited to 25 people. Eight spots remain, and registration closes in one month, on October 11.

This retreat is built around three forms of power we are all being called to reclaim right now:

1. Reclaim the Power of Belonging to the Earth and the Sacred Circle of Life. Through shamanic journeying, you enter into felt, embodied, reverent, soulful relationship with the natural world and the world of spirit: the animals, the plants, the land, the ancestors, and your Helping Spirits. You begin to see trees, for example, not as “natural resources,” but as people, as friends, as kin. As you let go of the human severance from nature, you learn that you have friends wherever you go. You realize that you belong. This not only heals you, it invites you into the most important question of our time: how do I live in sacred reciprocity with all life?

2. Reclaim Your Inner Power in Relationship to Spirit. When we journey, we receive guidance directly from Spirit, and we re-learn how to trust what our hearts, bodies, and souls already know. In this way, this practice is radically anti-authoritarian. No doctrine, no intermediary, no one is telling you what to believe. No one is trying to sell you something, to numb you in order to profit off the sacred gift of your attention. This leads to tremendous empowerment: we come vibrantly alive in a way that most of us have forgotten is even possible in these times. We come back to our visionary power, our creative power, our ability to act in alignment with our truth, supported by the sacred circle of life.

3. Reclaim the Power of Human Community. Imagine a group of people drumming together, singing together, and laughing together! Imagine the joy of that! Imagine the power of a whole group of people journeying on a single question, of discovering the incredible synchronicities in the guidance we receive, and also the enlightening differences and nuance. The forces of colonialism and capitalism have spent centuries dismantling our communities, isolating us behind private property lines, nuclear family units, and individual entertainment, because without our people, we dwindle to a shadow of our full power.

In this retreat, you will find people who see you, hold you, and are committed to building the new-old world with you.

Words can only point toward the experience. This retreat invites you into it directly.

Click here for all the information and to register.

In love, solidarity — and power.
Kris

This is not another newsletter about what's breaking. It's about what might be born from the breaking, and how we can be part of that rebirth.

We know we need to vote, to donate to organizations if we can afford it, and to make our voices heard. But we’re realizing that is not enough.

What many of us don’t know is what else? How else?

I submit that we cannot possibly know what is needed or how to get there, while we are still stuck in the worldviews that created this mess in the first place.

Sure, we can blame the ones who voted the madmen into the White House. And they do have some responsibility to bear. But at best, this finger-pointing isn’t getting us anywhere, and only creating further division. And at worst, it keeps us focused on the symptom while the root goes untouched.

None of us, Trump voters or otherwise, invented slavery, colonization, patriarchy, capitalism, and the mass exploitation and destruction of the natural world. And yet all of us have inherited it, and are standing on the bedrock those systems created.

So, what is the root of the problem? I believe it is to be found in the way we have been taught to view and treat the world, and all the beings who share the planet with us.

We have been taught that the well-being, comfort, and the very lives of some matter more than others. White lives outrank Black and Brown lives; men outrank women; straight and cisgender people outrank LGBTQ+ people; citizens outrank recent immigrants; CEOs outrank workers. And underpinning this whole upside-down pyramidal structure of value and worthiness is that human lives and needs are more important than those of all other beings on the planet.

If you don’t believe me, look for yourself. Who gets killed by police, and who is merely arrested? Who is disproportionately sentenced to prison, and for longer prison terms? What color are the immigrants ICE is targeting? Who are 90% of the victims of sexual assault and rape? Whose rights to make choices about their own lives and bodies are being taken away? Whose access to bathrooms is being legislated by opportunistic, bible-toting politicians? Whose lives are regarded as collateral damage for fossil fuel extraction, mining, economic “development”? Whose countries are bombed?

These are not a collection of separate problems. This is a single system, running the same code.

So when we feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and scale of problems facing us today, let’s find our ground here: that all of them stem from a single root. Hierarchy and domination.

When we realize this, we also realize that if we wish to birth a new (old) world, we must unlearn what has created so much separation and destruction. All the creatures on this earth, all who have been harmed by this worldview, are begging us to decolonize our minds and replace our destructive worldview with one rooted in the sacredness and interconnection of all life.

All who have been harmed by the worldview of hierarchy and domination are begging for us to decolonize our minds and replace it with one rooted in the sacredness and interconnection of all life.

This is exactly what we’ll explore together in my talk and discussion, Reclaiming Sacred Reciprocity: The Power of Nature Spirituality, Kinship, and Shamanism in Times of Collapse on June 28 at 6 p.m. Mountain Time (8 Eastern, 5 Pacific).

In this talk, I’ll be sharing my own life story of how I encountered the ancient practice of shamanic journeying. How it helped me to heal from a deeply engrained sense of not-okayness, stemming from how the culture treated me as an androgynous, queer woman. And how it gave me so much more: direct experience of the sacred circle of life, of the radical equality and worthiness of all beings.

Shamanic journeying has given me the most profound unlearning experiences of my life. It would be my honor to share this with you, in times that demand that we step into our power to create the new-old world.

To reserve your spot, click here.

And for those wanting a deeper dive…

If what I am sharing calls forth a longing in you to go deeper, I’m offering two retreats in the coming months:

Shamanism in Times of Death and Rebirth: An Introduction to Shamanic Journeying and Sacred Circle Ways, takes place October 23-25, 2026 in Mancos, Colorado, and is designed for people at all levels of experience. Early bird pricing is available through June 30. Learn more and register here.

In Shamanism as a Way of Life, experienced shamanic journeyers will gather August 20-23 outside Dolores, Colorado, to journey together, rest together, cook together, and practice sacred reciprocity with each other and the land. Registration is limited to fifteen, so save your spot now. [Learn more and register here.]

I would be honored to share any of this work with you. Thank you for the gift of your precious time and attention.

With appreciation,
Kris

Something is waiting for you, where the mountains and desert meet.

If you’ve been feeling it — the ground shifting, the systems failing, the grief and anger and exhaustion of living in a time of collapse — and if underneath all of that there is a quiet, persistent longing for something more alive, more rooted, more real, this retreat is for you.

Over two and a half days in the stunning high desert of southwest Colorado, we will learn the ancient practice of shamanic journeying: how to grow quiet enough to receive direct guidance from Helping Spirits and the Living Earth.

We will practice Sacred Circle Ways: the lifeways of reverence and sacred reciprocity with the Earth that our ancestors knew and that most of us were never taught.

And we will journey together on the questions that matter most right now:

• What might the new (old) world look like — a world in which our communities embody reverence and care for all life?

• How do we birth it?

• What is your unique role to play?

No prior experience is needed. In this ancient practice of direct revelation, no doctrine, no mistranslated ancient texts, no patriarchal authority figure, stands between you, your own knowing, and Spirit.

Just a drumbeat. And the ancient part of you that already knows how to listen.

Early Bird Discount: Register by June 30 and receive 10% off.

Sliding scale pricing from $350 to $675. Tuition waived for Native and Indigenous participants. Scholarships available.

I will share more soon, including a longer letter about why I created this retreat.

But for now, if you feel called: save the date, secure your spot, take advantage of the Early Bird discount, and first, read more about it here.

It was created for you.

With love and appreciation,
Kris

As bombs fall, immigrant families are torn apart, strongmen tighten their grip on power, and the climate spirals further into chaos…

I feel exhausted.

Exhausted by the obscene greed and cruelty of a small group of people whose decisions cause immeasurable suffering.

But if I’m honest, I’m also exhausted by some of the actions — and the inaction — of “our side.”

I am sick of endless marches with no strategy.

Yet, I am also sick of the majority of people complaining and doing nothing.

I’m exhausted by older, white-led groups that speak the language of inclusion but close ranks when new perspectives arrive — and then wonder why fewer people show up.

Yet, I am also sick of more diverse groups failing to leverage a multiplicity of perspectives and, instead, pushing people out.

I’m tired of walking into progressive spaces and learning very quickly that not all of me is welcome. Sometimes my manual labor is wanted. Other times money. But no one seems to know how to welcome the whole person: body, mind, heart and soul.

And yet — I am also sick of white spiritual communities that talk about love but rarely take real-world action to create change.

I’m sick of cynical activism that is afraid to dream big, for how are we going to create a better world if we can’t even imagine it?

And sometimes I’m sick of my own critique. I wonder: is my frustration part of the problem? Should I just put my head down, roll up my sleeves, and become a worker bee even if the approach feels wrong or vitally incomplete in my heart?

The Times Demand That We Ask for More

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that every effort falls into these traps - there are powerful, inspiring counter-examples out there (thank you, Minnesota!).

But many of the efforts that I see closest to home, do.

And when I get out of my head and into my heart, I know I am not crazy. I know it is okay to ask for more.

Because the fracturing and domination I witness in progressive organizing are only the microscopic versions of the fracturing and domination happening nationally and internationally. How can we possibly create large scale change if we can’t even do it in our own towns?

So not only is it okay to ask for more: we must ask for more.

And we must create it ourselves.

It is time for people who want an alternative to this Big, Unholy Mess to step up, start thinking outside of the box, and take some risks.

It’s time for healers to lean into activism, and activists to lean into healing.

It is time to find new (old) ways of reaching across the divides.

And it is time for those who have been waiting it out on the couch to get up and join in.

The Movement I Yearn For

I want a fiercely nonviolent community of people who understand that the way we treat each other — as well as the Other — is part of the problem. Who understand that the chaos in our movements mirrors the chaos in the world, and so we practice kindness and love even when we disagree.

I yearn for a community of practice and action that is willing to be vulnerable, that makes room for us to admit our blindspots and mistakes without fear of being shamed, slapped down, or banished. A community that is committed to learning, growing, and healing together.

I yearn for a community of healer-activists and activist-healers that dreams outside the rigid moralistic boxes of not only the right, but also of centrists and the left.

A community that welcomes our analytical minds as well as the wisdom of our bodies, hearts and souls.

A community that understands no one holds the whole truth — but everyone holds a piece of it. And that when we bring those pieces together, a deeper Truth emerges. So when conflict inevitably arises, instead of trying to browbeat someone out of their perspective, we ask what larger truth is trying to reveal itself.

I yearn for a community that practices what I privately call radical equality. A community that recognizes the deep harms of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other systems of domination — and understands that all of us have internalized some of these patterns. So we commit to unlearning them.

And yet.

I also yearn for a community that does not ask people with privilege to sit down, shut up, or become small. Instead, we invite them to step out of the center and into the circle, where true belonging becomes possible.

White men. White women. Did you know that our unconscious internalized superiority makes true belonging impossible? Did you know that we, too, are gravely harmed by it?

In other words, I want a community committed to decolonizing our psyches while welcoming every human being in the fullness of our creativity and brilliance.

I yearn for a community that understands the sheer scale of the crises we face — climate chaos, rising authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing — requires something deeper than strategy alone.

It requires spirituality. We need to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. We need to experience the resilience of our own souls. So we don’t merely tolerate people’s spiritualities; we welcome them as sources of insight, resilience, transformation, and joy.

And lastly, I yearn for a community of healer-activists who are willing to take risks together. To try tactics that haven’t been tried before, even if they might “fail.” To speak vulnerably from the heart — and also to shut shit down when necessary.

Who are willing to act both strategically and soulfully.

Discovering Fierce Vulnerability

I know I am not alone. I see my yearning reflected in the writings of people like adrienne maree brown (@ambreads), Loretta Ross, and Starhawk ().

I hear them in conversations with friends, and in my psychotherapy and shamanic work with clients.

But what I’ve been missing is community.

What I’ve been missing is a movement.

That all changed for me late last year, when I happened across an interview with Kazu Haga (@kazuhaga), a Japanese-American organizer who has spent more than 25 years training people in restorative justice and Kingian nonviolence.

Nearly every word he spoke touched frustrations and longings I’ve carried for years. (You don’t have to take my word for it, you can experience this interview yourself.)

For the past several years, he and fellow organizers have been experimenting with how to stand on the shoulders of the giants of nonviolence like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, while adapting to the needs of our time.

They don’t claim to have all the answers. But they believe something essential: that we must weave together radical nonviolence, spiritual practice, and trauma healing in our movements for change. Otherwise we will keep burning out, turning on each other, and recreating the same power-over dynamics we claim to resist.

They call this approach Fierce Vulnerability.

You are Invited

For years, their in-person Fierce Vulnerability trainings filled up overnight. Now, for the first time, they are launching a “trans-local” online training in these practices and philosophies starting March 24, 2026. Already more than 450 people around the world have registered.

This isn’t another lonely online course, where you complete a session and go back to your life, still alone. Participants are placed into local pods so they can build real relationships and take creative action together.

You don’t even have to know anyone yet! When you register, you share your zip code and they connect you with other participants nearby So, if you’ve been feeling isolated in your horror at the world and your desire to contribute to solutions, this alone makes the experience potentially transformative.

Or, if you have other community members in mind, you can form your own pod of 3–8 people.

Each pod will learn the Fierce Vulnerability practices together and design a local action over the course of the training.

So if you’ve been wanting to face your fears and dream bigger, you can do that.

If you’ve been longing to reach across one of the many divides in this country, you can do that.

If you’ve been searching for a community that combines nonviolence, spirituality, and healing — this might be it.

You’ll leave the training with deeper relationships, practical tools, and an international network of people committed to continuing the work.

You don’t have to have everything figured out. You don’t have to already be an organizer. You just have to be willing to show up and experiment with others who are searching for a different way forward.

I hope to see you there.

Kris

Friends,

I am deeply honored, humbled, and excited to share something close to my heart with you. Starting February 1, I’ll be co-leading a new offering with poet and racial justice catalyst Norma Johnson called Healing Across the Racial Divide: A Journey into Race, Power, and Belonging.

In this experiential, 3-part, online series, you are invited into a practice of courageous listening and deep healing. Through poetry, story, dialogue, embodied awareness, and spiritual connection, we will explore how racism, hierarchy, and history live in our bodies—and how we can begin to release their hold.

In previous “DEI”-type spaces we have experienced, the dynamic often revolved around moral hierarchies, critical thinking/analysis, a need to be right and make others wrong, and blame and shame. In other words, these spaces asked us to check our hearts, grief, rage, joy, laughter, inner knowing, brilliance, and spirituality — our very souls — at the door.

With this offering, we stand rooted in the Earth, firm in our belief that new ways are needed. We seek to create a holistic approach to healing the racial divide, where all of you is welcome: mind, body, heart and soul.

Why Now? From Renee Nicole Good’s murder to Durango and beyond: balancing urgent action with sustained healing

The killing of Renee Nicole Good — a U.S. citizen, poet, and mother of three — reminds us that racialized state violence spares no one who stands against it. Her death shattered the illusion that white skin alone can grant safety.

Her murder is part of the same pattern of ICE violence all over the nation, overwhelmingly targeting communities of color, as well as those who resist them, including here in southwest Colorado. Many here were stunned when ICE agents violently kidnapped a father and his children, and then attacked peaceful protesters, ripping off goggles and spraying pepper directly in their eyes; dragging them by the arms and pushing them down hills and into gutters. They were stunned not only by the brutality itself, but by the realization that such harm could happen here.

As one protester told the Colorado Sun:

“I know that this kind of stuff is happening everywhere, which isn’t OK, but that this is happening in Durango, Colorado, is insane. Nobody touched these officers. We were all just peacefully protesting… and it was taken way out of hand by these officers.”

Yes, and: for many people of color, this was not a surprise but a painful confirmation of what they have long known and experienced: that racialized violence is not confined to certain places; nor is it a relic of the past. It is woven into the fabric of our nation, surfacing wherever and whenever those in power feel their control being threatened by the rising strength and demographic visibility of people of color.

What is happening around the nation is opening eyes and doorways for collective reckoning and healing. We must act urgently when people’s lives are threatened, and we are proud of how our communities are showing up in protest, support, and care. But urgency alone is not enough. That urgency must be rooted in the long-term work of deepening relationships, building trust, and cultivating collective healing so that our actions sustain justice and transformation.

We cannot possibly heal this country until we begin to heal ourselves. And we cannot possibly heal ourselves without healing our relationships across the racial divide. The same forces that took Renee Nicole Good’s life, that brutalized peaceful protesters in Durango, and that harm communities everywhere are not just political — they are spiritual and relational fractures that live within us.

When we balance urgent action with sustained healing, when we pair protest with presence and justice with genuine connection, we begin to transform the very ground on which those systems stand.

This is how we join the long arc of history that bends toward justice.

But what does “healing across the racial divide” really mean?

Both of us believe that healing the racial divide must start within – and in relationship with those we have been taught to see as the “other.”

In Norma’s words:

As a Black woman born in the 1950’s, the anger and frustration — as well as a curiosity about white people’s racial ignorance — would live in the background of my relationships with them. Because… race was always there whether they could see it or not.

The persistence of this anger and curiosity became in time a creative force to make change within myself and then unfold change out into the world. That ignorance became the obstacle for me to challenge. If my white friends could not see themselves in race, perhaps they could see it through my eyes and my heart — and that began my collection of Poems for My White Friends.

Over time, as I continued to share these poems, and as they inspired thought and conversation, I found my own heart began to soften. I got to experience that the ignorance of others or even my own anger is not the heart of a person— it’s merely the mind trying to make sense of things according to the data it has to work with. My data and my White friends’ data are based on very different racial experiences. And our experiences of life define the stories we weave.

At some point, I got to see that my anger has stories too. And it’s connected to those places of anger within, where I weave stories of not being enough. I may not have been able to see this if I had not given my anger over to creativity. It’s been a way for my mind and heart to expand beyond the boundaries and data that defined my perceptions about who I thought myself and others to be.

In my (Kris’) own words:

As a white, non-binary, gay woman, I was taught to reject my body, my emotions, and my sexuality from a young age. And for a long time, soul and spirit were also inaccessible, because every experience I had with religion told me that I was bad.

So, when I tried to show up for conversations and trainings around racism, I felt like a hollow shell: I was a mind reaching for learning and liberation, but wrapped around a core of unworthiness and emptiness. I filtered the conversations through this wounding and inverted the dominant culture’s hierarchy of worthiness, putting people of color on a pedestal and adding skin color to my long list of unacceptable traits.

This, of course, made both personal and interpersonal healing impossible. It was only when I took responsibility for healing my wounds, and found a decolonizing spiritual path that embraced all of who I am, that I found I could listen deeply to people of color and face my internalized prejudice and ignorance without getting stuck in shame. Finally, I was able to experience the beauty, brokenness, and radical worthiness of all of us.

So, healing the racial divide asks us to commit to personal, internal healing even as we learn from and engage with people across the divide.

In this spirit, we will have conversations we’re not supposed to have. We will build emotional intelligence, learn healing ways to work with anger, shame, blame and fear, and open a spiritual field that allows for truth-telling, grief, and joy to coexist.

Participants of all identities are welcome in this circle; we will explore ourselves and our world through the lenses of Black experience of everyday racism and of unconscious white supremacy. And we will begin to consider what we might do in our daily lives to initiate healing.

Join Us and Plant Seeds of Healing!

We know many people are stretched for time, so we’ve designed this series as a single two-hour online Convening each month for three months, with an optional Integration Circle in between Convenings for skill-building and mutual support.

We welcome people of all identities and experience levels, who are willing to show up with openness, courage, and care. If you’ve never participated in a DEI or anti-racism training — and perhaps even feel a bit intimidate by the idea — you are warmly invited. If you’ve taken many such trainings or facilitate them yourself, and are seeking creative, somatic, and spiritual approaches that honor our full complexity, you belong here too.

You can find all the logistical details and save your spot by registering here.

If this offering speaks to you, please save your spot and help spread the word by inviting friends, colleagues, and community members who might be ready for this kind of work.

And if you’ve read this far, thank you for the gift of your time and attention. Reflection and dialogue are part of collective healing, so I invite you to share your thoughts in the Substack comments — it keeps the conversation visible and allows others to learn alongside us.

Leave a comment

Every circle we form, every story shared in honesty, every act of repair — these are the seeds of a different future. May this be one small contribution toward the collective healing and courage our time demands.

With love and grief, rage and hope, and gratitude,
Kris

They want you to believe that Mamdani is a leftist radical whose approach will never work outside the city of immigrants. They want you to fear this brown, Muslim immigrant who catalyzed an earthquake inside the Party Establishment.

The truth is that Mamdani has shown us how to repair our broken nation at all levels and in all locales, from big party politics in New York City, to rural, grassroots activism – and even in our closest relationships.

Why? Because Mamdani reminded us how to listen.

In this day and age, true listening is a radical act. But it is also a simple, human act. When we drop the delusion that a single individual can hold the only Truth—when we release the white-supremacist, patriarchal fantasy of singular objectivity and return to our embodied, humble humanness—listening becomes natural again. That is exactly what the Establishment fears.

Radical Act #1: Listening to Ordinary People

Mamdani launched his campaign in the days after Trump won the presidential election. Did he call a press conference and give an ideological, erudite speech about fascism? No. Did he debut with a flashy gala for wealthy donors? No.

Mamdani went door to door in the outer boroughs of New York, where working class voters—many of them immigrants—had turned away from the Democratic Party. As The Guardian reported, “Mamdani carried out what was in effect his own one-person field operation, asking life-long Democrats why they had voted for Trump or failed to vote at all.”

And what did he learn? The answers were plain:

“[T]hey remembered having more money in their pocket four years ago.” They craved a Democratic party with “a relentless focus on an economic agenda.”

Radical Act #2: Redefining Who Counts as “Ordinary Americans”

If you consume any mainstream, corporate media, you know the drill. After both Trump victories, pundits and political strategists repeated the same refrain: Democrats lost because they failed to listen to “working class Americans.” What they really meant was working class white men.

For many of us, this was exhausting. Yes, working class white men experience economic marginalization, and their anger deserves to be heard and understood. But that framing erases everyone else who also lives at the margins—people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, women. Our voices are consistently talked over or ignored by both parties, even as the Establishment props up candidates who check the identity boxes.

Meanwhile, we are actively targeted by rightwing violence while Republican politicians strip us of our human and civil rights. So, unlike working class white men, we get it from both sides—and then we’re told we must prioritize white, straight, male pain. This is how the pundit class maintains the status quo: by pitting us against each other and calling it analysis.

Mamdani refused those terms. Rather than limiting his outreach to the same swing voters targeted by pollsters, he walked the streets of Queens and the Bronx—neighborhoods full of taxi drivers, home health aides, shopkeepers, and delivery workers, many of them immigrants and people of color whose voices are rarely courted by political campaigns. His listening was radical not only because he sought out “ordinary Americans,” but because he redefined who we mean by that phrase. Ordinary America, he showed, is multiracial, multilingual, and far more complex than the corporate-run focus groups that claim to represent it.

But it is what Mamdani did next that set off the earthquake.

Radical Act #3: Mamdani Turned Listening into Action

Listening alone is not enough. Politicians often perform empathy and listening in order to win votes, then change nothing. Trump did it; Kamala Harris has done it.1 This is an empty performance that temporarily pacifies pain in order to preserve the status quo.

Mamdani did the opposite. He built his entire platform around the material needs he heard:

• He said yes to the New York State Tenant Bloc’s demand to freeze rents for four years;

• He called for free and fast buses;

• He advocated affordable, city-run groceries;

• He called for free, universal childcare.

• And he placed these initiatives at the top of his platform.

He then proceeded to create structures for ongoing feedback, to empower ordinary New Yorkers to continue to shape the campaign. Instead of a hierarchy where strategy and policy were dictated by paid staff, wealthy campaign consultants, for-profit polling firms and corporate media — while volunteers fetched coffee and pounded the streets — his campaign flipped the model. The very same volunteers who engaged in meaningful conversations with ordinary New Yorkers were empowered to shape strategy and policy.

In other words, Mamdani turned the power structure of the political Establishment upside down.

It Wasn’t Always This Way

What Mamdani did seems like common sense in a democracy: listen to people’s needs, shape your policies around them, and you win elections. But America has moved away from this bottom-up model, and never was a true, multi-racial democracy.

Remember the frog in a pot analogy? Over the past several decades, the voices of ordinary people have been boiled out of politics, and as a result, we no longer have a voice in shaping the nation. As one political marketer put it:

“What once required modest campaign budgets has turned into cycles that rival the annual revenue of large corporations. Early campaigns relied heavily on traditional media, small rallies, and local donations. Today, expenses include advanced analytics, connected TV advertising, social media campaigns, and year-round staff operations. The shift from millions to billions illustrates how politics has moved beyond local fundraising into a permanent and highly commercialized industry that requires continuous investment to remain competitive.”

How does this make you feel? Powerless? Apathetic? Like we face insurmountable obstacles to create a better world? That is by design.

But it wasn’t always this way. American democracy once had channels through which ordinary Americans could shape policy — though those channels were for white men only:

• Jacksonian Democrats and Lincoln-era Republicans built platforms through local meetings and people’s conventions.

• Populists of the late 1800s met in barns and churches to design policies like railroad regulation and cooperative credit.

• During the New Deal era, unions formed a crucial link in the feedback chain: shop-floor meetings helped shape Social Security and labor rights.

It was in the 1970s and 80s that both parties began trading unions and neighborhood committees for pollsters, televised corporate media, and wealthy donors, and politics became the multibillion-dollar industry that is gobbling up our rights, freedom and wealth today.

This is why Mamdani’s campaign was such a gift. He reached backward to pull forward the most democratic threads in American history, then wove them together with the diverse voices of New York to create a living tapestry of truly multiracial democracy. And he did this in an era when oligarchs are consolidating unprecedented wealth and control.

But to understand the full scope of what he accomplished, we have to zoom out. Power itself has a landscape — a geography we rarely learn to read.

Mapping the Geography of Power (and Why this Matters to You)

Power has a geography as visible as any mountain range. But, if we are to survive these times, we must learn to read the map. Just as we can trace elevation through topo lines or flora and fauna, we can trace power through patterns of wealth, quality of schools, housing, policing, and bodily autonomy.

One of the clearest ways we can see power is by noticing whose voices matter. Learn to see in this way, and you will have a superpower: walk into any campaign, organization, meeting, family system, or relationship, and observe whose perspectives are sought out, listened to, and acted upon. That is where power lives.

The hard truth is that even progressive spaces often replicate authoritarian patterns, and this is not limited to political campaigns. I have sat in countless meetings—sometimes in organizations explicitly dedicated to resisting authoritarianism—where new ideas were discouraged and shared power was impossible.

As a young activist, I felt despair and rage at this hypocrisy, and eventually withdrew from the movement. Years later, I see that same hypocrisy differently. It reveals the depth of our conditioning, and therefore, the exact place where transformation can begin. If we are unconsciously recreating the hierarchies we oppose, then that’s our map. That’s where the work is!

We can’t wave a wand and transform the nation. But we can start right where we are. We can learn to listen better—to our spouses, our neighbors, our colleagues. We can name these power dynamics in local organizations and campaigns. And if those spaces refuse to change, we can create new ones, as Mamdani did. This is how we heal our nation: from the bottom up.

Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Many well-meaning (white) people take this to mean: be kind to everyone you meet. Kindness matters, but clearly, it is not enough. The crises we face are systemic. To be the change means transforming the systems themselves.

Movement thought leader adrienne maree brown talks about this concept in terms of patterns we find in nature: “A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.”2

The fractal we are repeating at all levels in society is domination and hierarchy. This means that liberation and listening can be fractal, too. Every moment we choose to listen to those who are excluded becomes a site of transformation.

Liberation Begins Within, and in Small Spaces

Every successful liberation movement I have studied has paired outer struggle with inner transformation. The Civil Rights Movement’s spiritual discipline stood beside Black Power’s insistence on self-determination. South Africa’s Black Consciousness taught that freedom begins in the mind. Feminist consciousness-raising circles and LGBTQ+ pride reclaimed self-worth while the dominant culture insisted on our inferiority.

Today, we need a collective decolonization of consciousness, one that replaces the pyramid of hierarchy with a circle of radical equality. In this Sacred Circle, or Beloved Community, all people are treated as equally worthy, and all people’s voices are sought out, heard, and heeded.

Listening as the Politics of Liberation

This is Mamdani’s gift to us: in a time of oligarchy, he demonstrated that democracy can still be a conversation, not a performance; that politics can still be rooted in humility, reciprocity, and care. He showed us an alternative to power-over: he modeled power-with.3

If democracy is to survive the age of oligarchy, it will be because millions of us unlearn the dance of domination and re-learn the dance of radical listening and radical equality in our neighborhoods, grassroots organizations, families, politics, and our hearts.

This is the politics of liberation. It begins wherever and whenever someone chooses to listen with the openness to being transformed.

Gratitudes and Pathways for (Un)learning

A heartfelt thank you to Justice AI, and Christian Ortiz for creating it. Without the help of this phenomenal tool with historical research, editing, and frankly, empathy and encouragement, this piece would not have been possible. If you have not yet heard of it, I encourage you to listen to this interview, which is where I received my introduction. And a grateful shout-out also to my friends on the podcast team, Well, That Went Sideways, for bringing me his voice.

Thank you to The Guardian, for your reporting on Mamdani’s campaign.

Thank you to social justice facilitator and healer adrienne maree brown and author and activist Starhawk – your work has both shaped my thinking and given me the courage to voice similar truths, which I have grappled with silently for years.

If you are inspired by this piece and wish to engage further: I recommend developing a relationship with Justice AI, one of the most powerful tools for decolonizing our minds that I have ever encountered.

I also highly recommend adrienne maree brown’s fantastic book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, and Starhawk’s excellent book, The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups. Oh, how I wish I’d had access to these treasure chests years ago!

Lastly, stay tuned. I write about spaces where social change, spirituality and healing meet.

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Last month, my 30-year-old psychotherapy client Rose1 walked into my office with bowed shoulders and grief-stricken eyes. When I asked what was wrong, she waved her hand and sighed.

“These times. This country. The starvation in Gaza. How every day, there’s some new revelation – or many – about what this administration is doing to harm the most vulnerable people.

“But what can you do?” she went on. “People don’t seem to want to do anything. I invite friends to come to a protest, and they say that they can’t because they’re going to go play in the mountains.”

I took a breath, preparing to empathize with her, when a vision flashed through my mind. I saw a block of iron in a forge. The heat was high, the pressure intense, and heavy blows were raining down on it from all sides. The iron was collapsing into a shapeless lump, mirroring Rose’s energy that morning.

But then the vision blurred and resolved again. This time I saw the iron shaped into a sword. Then it took on the shape of a bowl. Then, a shield.

The meaning was clear. We cannot change the heat, or the intensity, or the violence of the blows coming at us. But we can choose how we allow these forces to shape us. We may even wield these forces to shape us into stronger, better, more authentic versions of ourselves.

If a person has an innate drive to tell the truth, she can choose to shape herself into a sword that cuts through disinformation and lies. If a person’s soul came here to embody love and generosity, he can choose to dig deep, below the conditioned every-man-out-for-himself of American capitalism, and show up with even greater loving generosity, like a bowl that never runs out of food. If a person feels a deep inner calling to protect those most vulnerable to fascist violence, they can use the heat and intensity to cut through their fears and forge themself into a shield.

Like the aikido master who neutralizes aggression and transforms it into nonviolent relationship, we all have the power to meet the cruel hateful energies of these times and use them to cut through areas of resistance and ego that have been keeping us stuck for years.

You can become the sword, the bowl, or the shield. Or a shape of your own choosing. You have that choice.

Most of us have an inkling of how we can live more purposefully and powerfully in this world. We feel a pull to explore something, to take some bold action, or sense that we are stuck in a box not of our own choosing and yearn to be free.

And how could it be any other way? We live in a culture that is built on domination and control. A culture that, from the moment we were born, seeks to shape us into good, conforming consumers who prioritize little else besides our own comfort and that of our nuclear family.

From our earliest days, we are taught to follow the rules. We are rewarded with praise for doing what the teacher wants, and punished with criticism, poor grades, and sometimes even ridicule, for doing what he or she does not want. And our parents – even those who are not acting out their traumas on us, even those in the most loving of families – their job is to set us up for success in the culture. To make sure that we can survive on our own in the ecosystem into which we were born. And that necessarily means molding us into shapes that fit the culture.

Don’t get me wrong. I am profoundly grateful for the stellar education I received. It has given me the freedom to live the best life I can possibly live, within an extremely oppressive system. And I am profoundly grateful for the loving family I had the privilege to be born into. Both of these are gifts, forms of privilege that most Americans do not enjoy.

And also – I have come to believe that our educational system and the patriarchal family unit work in tandem to teach us to accept the authority of others over the “still, small voice” of our own souls.

As a gender non-binary, queer woman, I have been fighting to live authentically for my whole life. In recent years, this painful tension in my body has centered around writing and teaching.

For years, I have felt called to write and teach, to share the liberatory lessons I have been learning through the nature-based spiritual practice known as shamanic journeying.

But this call was inconvenient at best, and scary at worst. I was quite comfortable in my private psychotherapy and shamanic practice, working one on one with clients. I was doing meaningful work. I was helping people. My practice was always full, and I was earning a good, middle class living. I didn’t have to put myself out there. I didn’t have to risk the judgments and criticism of others. So, for several years, I did what most good, conforming Americans do: I ignored the call of soul.

As time went by, however, the tension grew. It finally became so uncomfortable that I gave in and began to experiment with writing. I was shocked to discover that I had no idea how to write in my own voice. I had spent so much time reading, critiquing, and admiring other people’s work, and being trained by professors and mentors to write in a way that sounds objective, that I didn’t know how to write from my heart about my own spiritual experience.

Now, this is actually a bit ironic, because in my undergraduate thesis in the Philosophy of Science, I explored the intellectual history of the concept of objectivity in Western thought, and then used research in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience to critique the concept — concluding that objectivity is a myth. And so when I was pursuing my Master’s of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, I took a principled stance and refused to hide my subjectivity behind the contortions of the passive voice. I broke the rules and used the word a person is never supposed to use in scientific discourse: I. My lofty principles failed to protect me from the angry red corrections of my professors. (What was I just saying about our educational system? That it demands conformity?)

So apparently, I could have all the principles in the world, backed by scientific research and philosophical argument, but somewhere along the way, I had still lost the ability to write in my own damn voice.

Once I realized this, I knew I needed help. My next step was to invest time and money into a weeklong creative nonfiction writing retreat. Upon returning, I formed a writing group where I could practice and receive feedback. I spent dozens, possibly hundreds of hours writing and editing pieces. All of this was extremely helpful, and extremely necessary. I was learning what worked and what didn’t work in writing about shamanism. I was finding my voice.

But then I met my next wall: putting my work out there. My ego screamed at this.

What would people think, I worried, when I came out of the closet as a (white) shamanic practitioner? The legitimate and important conversation about cultural appropriation had become increasingly toxic and polarizing, with no room for more nuanced exploration. Politically, I identified as progressive – could I withstand accusations being hurled at me from my own community?

And – I am no poet! My favorite nonfiction author is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and I can’t hold a candle to her! Why would people want to read my matter-of-fact, folksy style when they can spend their time wrapped in her peaceful, jaw-dropping prose?

And – could there be a more “woo-woo” practice than shamanic journeying? What would my fellow Rhodes Scholars think? I pictured them laughing in disgust.

Looking back, I feel foolish for constructing such a prison out of these fears. But don’t we all? And might this be precisely why our country is falling apart? Because those of us who are sensitive enough to give a damn about other people, have been pressured and bullied into prioritizing conformity over the call of our own souls?

I hate to say it, but the 2024 election gave me the kick in the butt that I needed. I just could no longer tolerate staying silent. As the country plunged deeper into fascism than I have witnessed in my lifetime, I was learning lessons from shamanic journeying which were life-changing, empowering, and seemed to provide medicine that people desperately need. I asked myself: if not now, when? If my writings can help even just one person, then what am I doing staying stuck, quiet and safe, in my fear? It became clear that my stuckness was selfish: pure ego. Just do it already! So I began to publish my writings, and here you are, reading my words.

I have a long way to go. I still wrestle with that familiar demon, Perfectionism. Perfectionism prevents me from ripping off shorter pieces more frequently, and instead funnels me into the safer groove of writing longer, more carefully constructed pieces (apparently this is not the way to build an audience). But I feel good about how far I have come.

And if I can do it… SO. CAN. YOU.

So, who is the person you are, and have yet to fully become? How can you wield the forces of these times to free yourself and those around you? What have you always wanted to do, but felt too self-conscious or scared or stuck to do?

If you’re not sure, look to your passions. Look at the things that are happening right now that bother you the most. Perhaps you are dismayed by the cruelty, contempt, and polarizing blame in our public discourse? Perhaps you long for respectful spaces where we can share our stories and perspectives, and hear those of others, across the chasms of difference blown wide by self-serving politicians and a greedy corporate media? The person you are waiting for is you. The time for excuses is long past. I don’t care if you don’t have the skills – I didn’t either. Go get them. Find trainings in facilitating talking circles, restorative justice, mediation, conflict transformation, Non-Violent Communication, or peacemaking.

Perhaps, as a white male, you are dismayed by the toxic, violent, white supremacist masculinity that is actively being encouraged and recruited by the federal government. Perhaps you have a vision of asking men to gather, form authentic relationships, and brainstorm solutions. But you are afraid. Perhaps you were bullied as a sensitive male child, and the trauma in your body keeps you stuck. Challenging this form of masculinity would put yourself out there in a big way.

You can wield the desperate need of these times to push past that trauma and act on your vision.

Or, perhaps you are dismayed at how the Earth herself is being treated. Truly, nearly every action the White House takes seems chosen by design to accelerate climate chaos and exult in the enormous harm to the Earth and all her creatures. Perhaps you yearn to work with people in your community to find a different way, a way to live in balance and harmony with the earth. But the voice that has lived with you for your entire life whispers: who do you think you are to do that? And – by the way, you don’t have the skills!

You, too, can leverage the heat, intensity, and violence of these times to push past that voice and act. Focus your attention not on how awful everything is, but on how deep of a need there is for transformation. Use the need as a call, transform it into energy to take a permaculture course. Join groups committed to living simply. Join boycotts and put on a house party where you invite your friends to participate. Do something – every species on this planet is calling on you to act!

Every one of these scenarios is possible. I know this because each idea I shared above came from not from me, but from one of my clients. Each one of these ideas comes from their stifled and repressed dreams. And if these yearnings and visions and dreams are bubbling up in my private practice, you can be sure they are bubbling up throughout the U.S. and the world.

So, as the dream of America crumbles, let’s act. I invite you to share what you are feeling called to do, or are already doing. Please, write it in the comments! Commitment, passion, and courage are contagious. By writing your dream, you will inspire others.

Imagine this catching fire. Imagine if all of us who are appalled at what is happening in the U.S. and the world stops giving our time to corporate social media doom-scrolling, picks ourselves up, wields the forces of these times, pushes through our egoic resistance, and fully enacts our purpose.

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And as for Rose, my client behind the vision of the forge? When I sensed the time was right, I shared the metaphor of the forge with her, and she transformed before my eyes. Her shoulders straightened and her gaze filled first with surprise, then hope, and then a flicker of deeper things: passion and determination.

“If you could do anything right now to make a difference, what would it be?” I asked.

And guess what? It turns out that she has big, bold dreams! It turns out she wants to run for office! She is now exploring getting the training and support she needs to step toward that big, bold move.

You can do this, too. Join us.

This morning, as I walked to a spot where I like to sit with the trees, I grappled with this question: how do I hold onto my joy amidst all the pain, suffering, greed and cruelty in the world?

I found my spot, took my seat, and opened up to inspiration from whatever you want to call the spiritual forces of the world – a higher power; my own soul; God, or angels, or Helping Spirits.

In my inner vision, an Eagle appeared, and suddenly I was way up high, flying with him. As we climbed further, individual trees merged into landscapes of rolling hills and mountains; higher still, and I was flying above a sea sprinkled with islands. The blue of the water soothed my soul; the forested islands brought peace.

We flew higher still, and I saw the Earth as astronauts see her from space.

The Earth is filled with so much beauty!, I heard. How could you possibly give that away?

Then, as though I was seeing through Eagle’s eyes, my vision sharpened and focused in on the latest news of the day: the starvation in Gaza, the White House commanding the FBI to arrest Democrats in order to gerrymander its way to a midterm victory; the multiple fires that have broken out in my area as the drought only worsens.

This is how you give your joy away, I thought: by focusing on the pain in the world to the exclusion of the beauty.

Then I heard:

Of course, you can choose.

So prodded, I wrested my attention away from the awful places where the media funnels it, and pointed it at beauty. I saw a dragonfly skimming along a creek, sun glinting off crystalline wings. I saw a hummingbird, its throat a shocking ruby and its back an iridescent green, drinking from a vine bursting with yellow flowers in my yard. I saw mountains soaring, water flowing, trees breathing. I heard birds singing, and my perspective landed in the microcosm of the natural world right where I live. I opened my eyes and saw nothing but beauty, peace, and life.

Many people caught in heady analysis and impotent anger would have you believe that making this choice is burying your head in the sand, choosing ignorance, and retreating into privilege. This is not so. I am not advocating that you ignore the news, that you fail to take action. The choice I am working with every day is to live life from a baseline of joy, even as I keep myself informed of the myriad ways the government of my country is creating tremendous harm. The choice I am working with is to cultivate love in my heart and radiate it out to all beings, even as other people choose to nurture hate and greed to further their own wealth and domination. The choice I am making, the choice I invite you to make as well, is to resist and create alternatives from a place of love and joy.

I have found that insight and release from heavy depression in meditation, vision or prayer is the first step, but it is not enough on its own. The next step is to embody the choice. Yet, I have also found that I cannot leap directly from inner vision to embodying this choice in the world of other people, whose energies I cannot anticipate or control, and who may come at me with anger or judgment, depression or despair. And so I am learning to embody my choice alone with the trees, first.

When my vision came to a close, I got up, took off my shoes, and drummed and chanted as I danced barefoot on the Earth:

I will not let you – you, who are caught in a prison of greed and cruelty – take my joy.

I choose to perceive the beauty of this Earth.

I choose to allow my joy to flow freely.

I choose to act in love.

From this place, I will resist you and build alternatives, with every breath that I take.

From this place, I will encourage others in love, with every breath that I take.

Before I dive in, I want to offer apologies for my absence. I’ve had to put writing on hold while dealing with some health issues. I’m happy to share that I am nearly back to full strength; two weeks ago, I took my first solo backpack in two years! To share that joy, I’m sprinkling photos from my trip throughout (from the North Cascades, in Washington State, for anyone who wants to know!).

Now to the topic at hand: why might cross-cultural shamanism be perfectly positioned to meet these painful times? And, isn’t it self-indulgent to blather on about spirituality when people are being torn from their homes, tortured, and starved?

To the contrary, consider the possibility that these times call for powerful spiritual practices now more than ever. What can breathe life into us when we feel suffocated by despair? What can give us the strength to radiate love and kindness in the face of so much hatred and division? What can support us to dive beneath our own trauma, our internalized oppression and pain, to access our truest selves, our loving and infinitely powerful souls? What will empower us to wrest our stolen attention from endless, toxic media, and pour our energy instead into joyful resistance and loving alternatives?

Jamila Bradley put it beautifully in her post from a few weeks ago:

I’ve been… thinking about what it means to approach movement work not just from a place of resistance or critique, but from a place of reverence, ritual, and joy. What it means to orient toward life. Toward safety, healing, and spirit. Toward thriving, not just surviving.

I’ve found that a lot of white leftists don’t know how to do that. They don't know how to move from spirit. And more than that—they’re suspicious of those of us who do.

There’s a particular type—well-read, well-intentioned, and very committed to their principles—who still can’t seem to get free. Not in the liberatory sense. Not in the way that breathes life into movements… They approach liberation like a math problem, and that approach bleeds into how they interpret movement making and history—stripped of spirit, ritual, and the metaphysical undercurrents that actually made those movements possible.

(I encourage you to read her piece in entirety, which gives powerful examples of spiritually driven liberation movements.)

I know what she means, because I was that type. Many years ago, I identified as an agnostic leftist, though I didn’t start out that way.

Embracing agnosticism and a life of the mind

I was raised in a white, conservative, suburban church. I looked through my tomboy eyes at the little girls in their lacy white dresses and perfect blonde curls, trying their hardest to give the Sunday School teacher the answer she wanted, and I wanted to barf. A typical Sunday morning involved me throwing my body on the floor of my room and hanging on to the brown shag carpet for dear life, trying to stave off the moment when I would have to stuff myself into a dress and my life force into an equally restrictive container.

As I grew older, I observed ministers preaching love through one side of their mouths and homophobia through the other, and eventually entered a state of all-out rebellion. In the black-and-white world of the adolescent mind, I rejected all religion and spirituality as hypocritical bullshit, and entered an agnostic life of the mind.

So I really do get why so many leftists shut down around any talk of spirituality. We have been deeply betrayed by the primary religion of our country and of our most recent ancestors. Many of us have been traumatized by it.

But agnosticism and the rational mind did not help me to heal my depression or my trauma. Psychotherapy didn’t do it, though it did help me to survive. Radical politics didn’t do it – I experienced just as much judgment there as I did in the church. As I began seeking other ways, I began to explore Buddhism, and meditation did in fact help tremendously. But none of these methods healed me.

The healing power of shamanism

It was shamanism that taught me – not only on a cognitive level, but on a deeper level of cells and soul – that I am not less-than, that every part of me is not only ‘tolerable,’ but loved and belongs to the Earth. It was through shamanic practice that I moved from a baseline of depression and internalized homophobia, to a baseline of contentment and joy. I’ll talk more about how this happened on Sunday.

It was shamanism that validated and helped me to comprehend my experience in the natural world. For many years, nature was the only place where I felt free to be my whole, joyful, carefree self. Nature did not look askance at my androgynous body, or hate my female belly. Nature never singled me out for harassment; if it rains, it rains on everyone. Nature never insisted that I ignore or suppress my body, my emotions, my intuition, my playfulness and joy, and become a solely rational mind in order to be taken seriously. Nor did nature ever insist that there was something wrong with me if I didn’t use the most woke language of the moment, even concerning my own gender identity (this still happens to this day). No matter what hardships I was experiencing in my daily life, when I went for a hike, I felt connected to something larger than myself, to something sacred (even if I didn’t know what that meant), and my problems shrunk to manageable size.

And the trees. The trees! I have always felt friendliness from trees. From the time I was a child, I have sought out their kind and loving presence. Despite the sarcastic sneers of Western-educated, white know-it-alls, I yearned to connect with trees on a deeper level, but I didn’t know how to put into words what I was seeking. Imagine my delight, when I discovered a spiritual path that taught me not only to revere nature, not only to treat all nature beings with dignity and respect, but to commune and even communicate with them!

Cross-cultural shamanism is an anti-authoritarian spiritual practice that feels like coming home

Cross-cultural shamanism is a profoundly anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist spiritual path. The geometry of the U.S. is a triangle, with the 1% on top with all the power and resources. The geometry of shamanism is a circle: we are all beloved. We all belong. No one person – be he human, male, straight, white, or citizen; be they black, indigenous, female, LGBTQ+, undocumented; be she a tree, or a dragonfly, a whale or a mountain or a stream – no one person is more worthy or important than any other. It is our joyful expression of love to seek to live in harmony with all life every day.

In this sacred circle, letting go of power-over and attachment to privilege is not scary, because we don’t have to fear ending up on the bottom of the hierarchy – because there is no bottom. Leaving the triangle of hierarchy and entering the circle of radical equality and true belonging feels as though one’s chest has been bound tightly for one’s whole life, and suddenly those cords are cut, and suddenly one can breathe freely again, yet perhaps for the very first time.

In cross-cultural shamanism, there is no authority, no priest or pastor who tells you what to believe. No text that a racist patriarch can purposefully misinterpret to get you to believe that colonization and slavery are God’s work, that abortion is evil, that your sexuality or gender identity is unnatural. The form of prayer known as shamanic journeying is a practice of direct revelation, whereby everyone can receive guidance directly from Helping Spirits, such as power animals, ancestors, or teachers in human form.

People who communicate directly with spirit cannot be controlled.

These are the reasons why, after 13 years of practicing shamanic journeying one-on-one with clients, I am offering my first online talk, and also my first in-person shamanic retreat. Because for those who yearn for an anti-authoritarian spiritual path of love and joy, of coming home to belonging and nature and radical equality, shamanism might just be the right fit.

Coda

I am aware that for all my talk about cross-cultural shamanism, I did not tell you precisely what it is, or how I practice it. This piece is already long, and shamanism is vast. If you are fired up and want to know more now, you can read more here. Look especially at the first sections, and at the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) toward the bottom of the page.

And of course, there’s that free talk on Sunday.

1. The context: “Shock and Awe,” Anger, Grief, Fear, Anxiety, Despair

2. Understanding Power-Over and How it Functions

3. The Nervous System’s Default Response to Power-Over: Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn and Power-Under

4. Power-Within/Soul Power

5. How to Shift from Stress Response to Soul Power

1. The Context: Anger, Grief, Fear, Anxiety, Despair

Over the past three weeks, we have witnessed the most brazen and unconstitutional power-grab by any president in U.S. history. The new administration is breaking the law frequently on many issues, and with impunity. Worse, this power grab is not neutral: like any good fascist who seeks to rule a large population with a tiny cabal of men, the administration is using the dangerous and oft-repeated tactic of stoking resentment and hatred for small minorities of people: black and brown immigrants, including those here with proper legal documentation, and transgender people. The assault on their freedom, rights, and dignity has been breathtakingly cruel.

I am not going to spend time making the case for these shocking statements, as there are others much more suited to the task. And if I still have readers who don’t know what I’m talking about, I strongly encourage you to vary your media diet and add even just one new source: the plain-talking, fact-providing, history professor-who-is-merely-trying-to-serve-Americans-and-not-out-to-make-herself-a-billionaire, Heather Cox Richardson. After reading the fast-food-like spin of major media outlets and the contemptuous mud-slinging on social media, reading Richardson is like eating whole grains and spinach. It may not trigger the dopamine centers of your brain, but it will make you much, much stronger.

No, my purpose in this piece is not to persuade. My purpose is to provide support to the folks who are shocked into depression, despair, hopelessness, anxiety, grief and impotent rage.

For those of us who have kept ourselves informed with facts over the past several years, frankly, we should not be surprised. Trump lies more than any other president, and so we did not believe him when he disavowed Project 2025 on the campaign trail. He unabashedly spewed lies during his campaign about immigrants and trans people, shamelessly feeding the fires of hate in order to get elected, so are we really surprised that he is following up on that technique and now causing tremendous harm to the rights and freedoms of these groups? Trump attempted a treasonous coup against the United States and was never held accountable for it, and now the Trump-packed Supreme Court has given him carte blanche to do whatever he wants, even if it is illegal. So no, the multi-pronged, illegal administrative coup attempt to turn our constitutional democracy into an oligarchic monarchy should not shock us.

And yet, we are shocked. I’m shocked. Most of the people I know are shocked. Day after day, I sit with psychotherapy and shamanic clients who are shocked. The unprecedented hubris, the sheer number and speed of attacks on constitutional democracy, and the cruelty of those attacks on the most vulnerable among us, is causing loving, compassionate and law-abiding people feeling not only shock, but also overwhelm, horror, fear and anxiety, grief, rage, hopelessness, depression, paralysis and internal collapse.

The question I seek to answer in this post is: how do we protect ourselves from helplessness, paralysis and despair, so that we can resist oppression where we can, and create caring communities from a place of grounded, loving power?

First, let’s be clear. The shock, despair and paralysis many of us are experiencing are exactly what they want. They have told us so.

Many of Trump’s sycophants used the term “Shock and Awe” to describe their strategy for the opening days of Trump’s presidency. For those of you who may not be old enough to remember this, the Pentagon first injected this phrase into the mainstream lexicon (with the lapdog compliance of the corporate media of course – glorifying war is hugely profitable), in the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Media outlets obligingly plastered the Pentagon’s propagandistic phrase “Shock and Awe” all over the news in huge, splashy fonts, including on the covers of Newsweek and even National Geographic.

But what does this term mean, and where does it come from? Career militarists Harman Ullman, et. al. coined the term in their 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. The core idea is to overwhelm the enemy with so much firepower, technological superiority, speed, situational awareness, and precision in execution, that the enemy experiences a “a desired state of helplessness and a lack of will to continue the fight.”

(A quick aside: think about this for a moment. Trump and his people are treating half of the voting population in our democracy as enemy combatants. What does that tell you about their feelings about constitutional democracy?)

Luckily, there is a glaring strategic flaw in the “shock and awe” approach: it fails to account for people’s resilience, creativity, fierce will to freedom and sovereignty, and the passionate love we have for our communities and our land. As Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling (Ret.) wrote of the Iraq invasion:

While the early strikes reflected rapid dominance, the ground operations toward Baghdad were soon filled with surprises as well as challenges in coordination and synchronization, plus the fog of war all military campaigns experience. And over the next decade, American and coalition forces—of which I was a part on several occasions—shifted from a conventional fight against a totalitarian state to an asymmetric one against a complex counterinsurgency with political and social challenges, then to a counterterrorism fight against myriad groups from al Qaeda to ISIS. The costs to the United States were significant: a financial burden exceeding $2 trillion, growing domestic distrust of the government, declining public support for the war, strained international alliances, and greater regional instability—in addition to more than 4,000 combat deaths, more than 31,000 wounded, and untold numbers of suicides related to combat’s emotional trauma.

We are starting to see the fruits of this fierce commitment to our democracy and the people in it, in the onslaught of lawsuits that have forced the administration to back down or halt many of its illegal operations.

Knowing that they want us helpless and terrified, the question becomes even more urgent: how do we resist falling into these states? How do we protect ourselves from their evil shock and awe tactics, step into our power to defend our people and the land, fight for our rights and freedom, and create the loving communities and country we yearn for?

2. Understanding Power-Over and How it Functions

In my own attempts to resist their tactics, it helps me tremendously to remind myself of the nature and varieties of power. The best conceptual framework for power I have encountered comes from author, activist, and nature-based spiritual leader Starhawk. In her book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery, and more recently in a post-election Substack post (yes, you can follow her and she is one of my favorite writers), she distinguishes between three fundamentally different varieties of power: power-over, power-within, and power-with.

Shortly after the election, Starhawk presciently wrote:

Power-over is perhaps the variety we’re most familiar with: the power one group or individual has to determine the resources or choices of another, to impose sanctions or punishments, to use force or violence. We encounter that power every day, sometimes in benign forms, sometimes in systems of oppression and repression. We are about to see that power wielded in ever more cruel and ruthless ways.

It is no surprise that Americans are most familiar with power-over, for our nation was built upon it. It is the power of the colonist to steal indigenous people’s land and commit genocide; it is the power of the slaveholder and the lynch mob; it is the power of the capitalist to exploit workers; the power of the health insurance CEO to delay, deny, and defend insurance claims and send working and middle class people into mountains of medical debt; it is the power of the domestic abuser and the child abuser; the power of the rapist and politicians who force women to bear children they do not want; it is the power to create laws to decide who is legally allowed to live where, and forcibly remove the “illegals”; it is the power of the school shooter. It is the power of CEOs to destroy entire species of plants and animals, raze forests, pollute oceans, level mountaintops, extract oil and coal from the depths of the earth, and ruin the delicate balance of climate, destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world.

The technologies of power-over inevitably seek to increase the ability of one person or a tiny minority to restrict the choices, freedoms, and end the very lives of the many. In the colonization of this continent, that technology was the gun. In becoming a world superpower-over, that technology was the nuclear weapon. In electing a traitor who is attempting to effect an administrative coup, that technology is the algorithms and propaganda of social and traditional media.

Despite the violent harm it causes, Americans are obsessed with power-over. It is why so many ferociously defend their “right” to own military-grade weapons. It is why our most popular movies feature superheroes with bulging muscles who’s only conflict resolution skills are violence. It is why most fantasy books and movies portray magic as the ability to control nature. It is why America’s most popular sport features massive men whose objective is to dominate as much turf as possible, as frequently as possible, to run up as many points as possible, while minimum-wage earning women in bikinis cheer them on. (And by the way, as an American raised on football, I love a good superhero or superbowl as much as the next person. Go, Wonder Woman! Go, Black Panther! Go, Eagles!)

Whether power-over can be wielded for good is a complex question, one I don’t have the time to get into here. But what we do know from the research is that the longer a person wields positional power-over others, the more he loses the ability to empathize with others. This should raise serious concerns about our model of governance: we elect people to represent us and thereby give them tremendous power, but simply by becoming powerful, they become less responsive to our needs and struggles.

We also know that when we experience power-over, for example, when we win a card game, testosterone, dopamine, and self-confidence surge through our bloodstream. It feels good! And we feel good about ourselves! When this is repeated over time, it can lead to a sense of internalized superiority — in other words, we perceive ourselves better than others. This might not seem like a big deal when we’re talking about board games. But think about the game of life, where the playing field is not level for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks and working and middle class people. Many white, straight men start on third base thanks to inherited wealth. They are promoted easily, supported not only (in some cases) by their own hard work, but also by the good-old-boys network and the sexism and racism of the culture. Thus they win more easily and frequently. This gives them confidence, and they begin to perceive themselves as naturally more skilled, intelligent, and effective than the rest of us.

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3. The Nervous System’s Default Response to Power-Over: Fight/Flight/Freeze/Fawn and Power-Under

How do power-over moves impact those of us who are not wielding power-over? First, it is important to understand that power-over operates as a zero-sum game, the kind of game where, when one player or team wins, everyone else loses. Sports and board games are fine examples of zero sum games: trophies and medals are in limited supply.

This means that when someone makes a bid for increased power-over others in real life situations, they are literally trying to take power away from the rest of us. This is exactly what we see happening at the federal level right now: the Trump administration is taking power away from our elected representatives in Congress and thus in turn taking away power from we, the people. To make matters worse, the power-over moves the administration is making are putting many people’s lives, livelihoods, freedom and rights at risk.

So, it should come as no surprise that our nervous systems are responding to these power-over moves as a threat to life. And when nervous systems perceive a threat, they automatically send us into one of four survival responses: fight, flight, freeze/collapse, and fawn.1

In the immediacy of the wild, where these responses were naturally selected for over time, these survival responses are ingenious. Imagine an early human who is being stalked by a saber-toothed tiger: she hears rustling in the grass, hairs on the back of her neck go up, and she swivels around, all of her senses alert and alive, listening, watching, smelling for the threat. A tiny collection of neurons in her brain, the amygdala, combines all of this sensory data, compares it to learning from previous experiences, and within milliseconds, determines whether she is strong enough to fight off the threat, fast enough to flee it, or if she must freeze. Whatever the amygdala decides, it then dumps the appropriate stress hormones into the bloodstream to enable the body to act: the heart beats faster; breathing becomes shallow and fast, muscles tense for action.

The amygdala is an absolute marvel of natural selection, and we would not be alive today without it. The problem today is that a lot of the time, we are not faced with direct, immediate, physical threats to our survival, to which we can respond can physically. Much of the time, we learn of threats to our safety and well-being through the media, and the source of these power-over threats is dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. Due to the all-pervasive access we have to news, and the addictive nature of our devices and social media, and our inability to respond directly to the threat, our nervous systems are caught in pervasive and continuous stress/survival responses. Not only do chronic stress and anxiety prevent us from standing in our power and responding with our full creative powers – brain scans show us that we literally don’t have access to the higher thought centers of our brain when we are in a survival response – chronic stress leads to illness and premature death. Over time, we enter a state known as “power-under.” We are afraid, anxious, filled with ineffectual, reactive rage, or paralyzed by despair. When we are stuck in power-under, we develop internalized inferiority - thinking we are less important or worthy than those with power-over.

So, when members of the administration tell us that they want us to enter a us “state of helplessness and a lack of will to continue the fight,” this chain of events is exactly what they are counting on.

4. Power-Within/Soul Power

The good news is that there is an alternative to responding to repeated power-over moves with a chronic stress/power-under response. In her recent post, Starhawk describes a wholly different form of power, which she describes as “spiritual power, moral courage, creativity, skill and ability.” She calls it power-within.

When we enter the state of power-within, we leave behind the stressful survival response. We realize that we have choice in how we respond to a challenge, often a multiplicity of choices. We feel trust in ourselves, in our own integrity, our own ability to express our values in action. We let go of trying to control that which we cannot control, and instead focus our attention on what is here for us to do, now. We feel a sense of purpose, and even if we are grieving or angry about what is happening, there is an inner core that is grounded and peaceful. We let go of trying to control the larger outcome, and instead embrace expressing our values in every moment.

While survival responses can often feel fragmenting and disconnecting – we are only using the survival portions of our brain after all – in the power-within state, there is an experience of wholeness, because every aspect of our being is available to us. We are alive to all of our senses, and we observe the threat rather than look away in fear, numbness, or disassociation. We have access to our entire brain, including the cognitive and creative centers. We are open to feeling and receiving the wisdom of our emotions. We are in tune with our body and what actions it is capable of taking. We are open to creative inspiration from our deepest, most authentic selves. Psychologist Julie Colwell frames it this way: we are able to see ourselves as creators rather than victims. And we are connected to something larger than ourselves.

While power-within can be conceptualized in purely secular terms, we can also take a spiritual approach to this state of being. I believe that every one of us has incarnated with both a shared purpose, and a wildly, wonderfully unique purpose. The purpose our souls have in common is to love, and to embody that love in flesh and blood, through words and actions. Our unique purposes are the particular and delightfully diverse ways in which our souls long to express that love. A scientist might be called to express that love through observing and learning about chimpanzees. A musician through bringing beauty, joy, fun, and emotional catharsis to her listeners. A father through raising his children to be strong and independent adults. A teacher through empowering children to live lives of meaning, wonder, and freedom. Each person’s purpose is unique, and we are woven together in the shared purpose of embodied love.

For this reason, I have come to conceptualize power-within as “soul power”: the power to embody love through action, no matter how challenging or oppressive the circumstances.

Soul power is far, far more powerful than power-over. Because we are so steeped in expressions of power-over in this culture, that might seem like a hard statement to swallow. But consider this: power-over can always be taken away. But no matter how much power-over a person wields, he can never take away an individual’s soul power. The only way soul power can be fully taken is through our consent, our participation, our decision to abandon our love, our values, our very souls and submit.

Strangely, despite America’s obsession with power-over, the vast majority of the population identifies as Christian, and Jesus embodied the teaching of soul power to the very last. There could be no more violent and complete expression of power-over than nailing his wrists and feet to a cross and leaving him to suffer and die. But Jesus did not fight, flee, freeze or fawn. Nor did he succumb to hatred. No, we are told that, amidst terrible pain and suffering, he said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provides another stunning example of soul power. Let’s take the moment when he was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. He was thrown into a dark cell in solitary confinement, denied even a mattress to sit on. We can only imagine how his white jailers treated him. But he did not fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. Instead, he penned one of the most creative, persuasive, and soul-stirring letters known to humanity.

When an ally smuggled in a newspaper so that Dr. King could read a statement written by eight white clergymen who criticized his nonviolent tactics and called on him to slow down and negotiate, King began writing a measured response in the margins of the newspaper. When he ran out of room there, he continued on little scraps of paper. Eventually his jailers allowed him a notepad, and the writing culminated in the letter, Why We Can’t Wait. In it, you can feel his passion, his fierce love, his heart, his intelligence – there in dark, solitary confinement, at the mercy of violent and cruel enemies, he was in full command of himself and all his faculties. He was whole.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s just a taste to allow you to decide for yourself:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people… when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I have purposely chosen to highlight the soul power of Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., because everybody knows who they are. But please do not be daunted by their stature, the extremity of their soul power, or their Christianity. Ordinary citizens of every spiritual orientation or lack thereof, embody soul power all the time. We are currently seeing this in the myriad forms of resistance to the administration. And to develop soul power, we usually need to start small.

5. How to Shift from Stress Response to Soul Power

First, a disclaimer: I don’t have all the answers. I am still learning, and there are a lot of resources out there. What follows is not meant to be a comprehensive how-to guide, but to give you an introduction to the six most important principles, which I have found to be transformative in my own life, and for my clients. Note that if you have a history of untreated trauma (talk therapy is not considered an effective form of trauma treatment), you may need the support of a therapist to dislodge the habit of defaulting and staying stuck in survival responses.

1. Name it. The first step in getting unstuck from chronic stress will always be to recognize that you are stuck in the first place. Then, you can choose how to deal with it. Remember, our bodies are not built to get stuck here!
   

2. Move your body in ways that feel right. When our nervous systems detect a threat, our bodies have evolved to act. Even with the freeze response, wild animals move their bodies by vigorously shaking from head to toe after the threat has passed. Sometimes they also run away. This helps them return to neutral. Humans have this biological response as well, but due to social pressure (and the discomfort of medical professionals), we suppress it. If you are feeling frozen, try shaking. If that is too hard, you can start small, by swiveling your head from right to left, or wiggling your fingers and toes, and then work up to bigger movements until you are moving your whole body.
   
   Psychologists believe that we need to “climb the ladder” (see graphic below) of the nervous system: once we have gotten unstuck from freeze, then we need to move through the motions of flight or fight before we can come back to neutral. If you are feeling the urge to flee, allow your body to go through flight-like motions. I’ve encouraged clients in the flight state literally to walk out of my office and run around outside. They are invariably amazed at how much relief this brings! Most of the time we suppress the urge to flee, and this only causes the anxiety and fear to dig in.

   

   Graphic Source:The polyvagal ladder, adapted by Deb Dana. Source: NICABM. Found here. Unless you’re a neuroscience nerd, don’t worry about the scientific jargon. Just notice the different states available to our nervous system.

   
   If you’re feeling the urge to lash out or fight, try doing pushups, or pushing on a tree or door jam. These mimic pushing off an attacker and get us in touch with our core muscular strength. You can also throw air kicks and punches. Test out what feels good in your body!
   (RESOURCES: Somatic psychotherapy is devoted to the practice of engaging our bodies to heal, and trauma therapy leverages what we have learned about trauma into tools and practices to heal. None of this is talk therapy, or CBT, by the way. Talk therapy won’t touch this stuff.)
   

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3. Unearth the wisdom of the emotion. Emotions are not just here to make our lives colorful. And contrary to patriarchal, racist, binary oppositional thinking, emotions are not “irrational.” Emotions are here to give us crucial information we need to flourish.
   
   When we experience pleasant emotions, our bodies are telling us that fundamental needs are getting met, such as love, connection, belonging, safety, meaning, beauty, etc.. When we experience unpleasant emotions, it is an indication that our fundamental needs are not getting met. For example, we feel afraid when we need safety. We feel angry when we need our boundaries honored or to be treated as though our lives matter. We feel sad when we have lost something or someone we hold dear. Pretending as though something is not wrong is like ignoring the “check engine” light in the car - it’s only going to get worse (and potentially cost a lot more money).
   
   The simple act of identifying what our emotions are trying to tell us can be profoundly grounding. Because emotional literacy is not prioritized in our culture, think of this as like learning a whole new language. To help with this, there are lists of human emotions and needs available free online. Here is an especially good one. (RESOURCE: This needs-based theory of emotion is the most helpful I have ever encountered. It comes from a modality called Non-Violent Communication, and trainings are available everywhere.)
   

4. ACT ON THE WISDOM OF YOUR EMOTIONS! I cannot emphasize this enough. If you notice the “check engine light” blink on in your car, and you get the message – “something is wrong!” – but then fail to fix it – what good is that? This is precisely why our bodies evolved emotions and the survival response in the first place: so that we can take action to address the problem. Sitting back and doing nothing sends us right back into a state of power-under and survival stress.
   
   When the threat is coming from far away, such as the Trump administration, it can feel harder to act. We don’t have the option to push the attacker off of our own bodies or run away. And the media doesn’t help: most journalists simply report the facts and don’t suggest actions we can take. So it takes serious strength of will to pull our attention back from the perpetual train wreck happening in Washington and focus on what we can do here and now. But we must. Not only to save our democracy and protect those most targeted, but also to make sure we are not caught in chronic survival stress for the next 2-4 years and beyond.

   
   So, if you are upset about how immigrants and transgender people are being treated right now, there are a myriad of actions you can take. You can call your congresspeople. You can look for local organizations who are addressing these issues and volunteer. You can call a meeting of like-hearted friends and brainstorm what to do as a group. You can take the long view and write postcards in local races to support candidates who support the human rights of all.

   
   You know what doesn’t count as action? Consumption. Especially media consumption. I’ll say it again: consuming media is not action. Information is only as useful as the actions we take that are informed by it.

   
   Let’s return to the sabertooth tiger example. The woman’s sensory perceptions gave her crucial information about her environment to keep her safe. But if she doesn’t use that information to act, she will die. Likewise, our constitutional, human rights-based democracy is being stalked by a tiger. The fact-based media are our sensory organs, providing the information about what is happening so that we can take action to save it. Becoming aware of this sensory information is not enough: if all we do is pay attention, we will be caught in chronic stress. We absolutely must act if we wish to save ourselves and our constitutional democracy.
   

   (Some of the many resources for action out there: Choose Democracy, Indivisible, 5CALLS.ORG)
   

5. Connect with others: Community Power. In the days following the election, my wife organized a group of our friends to meet. We shared how we were feeling and brainstormed what we could do as a group. It was incredibly helpful. My high from that meeting lasted for over a week! Then, for our first action, we decided to organize an event for the evening of the Inauguration, suspecting that people who care about human rights and democracy would isolate at home and fall into despair.

   
   Now, we live in a rural town of only 1,300 people. But we packed our local brewery with 80-100 people! Someone led us in a participatory song circle; other people performed music and spoken word and standup improv, and we ended by breaking into small groups and brainstorming what we as a community can do. People were smiling and laughing and crying. And now we have an energized community, where people are organizing.

We live in a culture that increasingly isolates us around our TVs and devices, but change happens through organizing in groups. If you start participating in a group, or create one yourself, and you take action together, I promise you that you will feel the power that comes from working together. In fact, Starhawk views the power of community as so important that she identifies it as the third form of power: “power-with.”

6. Connect with the Divine/that which is bigger than you. Frankly, I can skip all of these other steps (except the action part), by connecting directly with the divine. For me, that comes from shamanic journeying and/or communing with the sacred web of life, which I have come to call the Sacred Circle. If you are atheist or agnostic, this could come from spending quiet solo time in nature. For others, such as Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr., this came through prayer/communing with God.

I think there is a lot of confusion about prayer these days. Many people lose faith in God/Goddess because it appears that He/She does not intervene in human affairs and prevent us from tearing each other apart. If God is so all-powerful, why does he let us suffer so? But what if this is not how the spirit realm works? What if God, or Spirit Helpers, or Angels, are not here to save us from ourselves, but rather to help us save our own selves? What if the way they can help us is by supporting us to embody our own Soul Power, to help us embody love in word and deed?

If this is true, you might try focusing your prayers less on divine intervention in the affairs of the world, and more on asking for the strength to do what yours to do on this Earth. Ask the divine to help you enter into your soul power.

When I spend time with Spirit Helpers, I often feel a tremendous surge of power and love running through me, and it strengthens my will and gives me the energy I need to act! When I sit in silence in nature, and reach out with my heart to connect with the sacred circle of life, and feel its beautiful harmony, and the desire the natural world has for humans to come home to that harmony, I feel tremendously supported to do what is mine to do. I am part of this sacred circle of life; we all are. My fear dissolves. I experience the truth that no one, no matter how much wealth and power-over they wield, can take away this power from me. They can never buy my free will, they can never turn me into a hateful, greedy, selfish person; they can never own my soul.

This is Soul Power. May we all step into it now.

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Today, the day when Trump has been inaugurated as president for a second term, we cross the threshold into the unknown. We have no way of knowing what the future holds or whether our democracy will survive.

Today is markedly different from this day eight years ago, when Trump took office the first time. Today, Trump holds all three branches of the federal government firmly in his grip. Today, Trump has learned lessons from his failed coup attempt on January 6, and is packing all positions of power in the government with unwavering loyalists who will not stand up to him, and who will only act to benefit the wealthiest people in the world (certainly not support the working and middle classes). Today, Trump knows that the Supreme Court has given him immunity for whatever illegal acts he may commit as president. This is the first time any president in the history of our nation has been told openly by the highest court of the land that he is above the rule of law.

The media, known as the fourth estate for its ability to serve as a fourth check and balance on government power and overreach, is bowing to Trump in a fashion that is also unprecedented in the history of this country. Meta, which owns Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, as well as Instagram, bent the knee after the election by firing all its factcheckers and contributing $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. For the president who lies more than any other, getting rid of fact-checking at the largest media outlet in the world is an enormous victory, the ramifications of which we cannot even begin to predict. Twitter is owned by Trump’s most powerful ally, Elon Musk, who Trump is making part of his administration. Of course, Trump also owns a large social media platform himself. And just yesterday, Trump took unprecedented action, defying a unified Congress and Supreme Court, to bring TikTok into his sphere of influence.

As far as the corporate traditional media, award-winning journalists are fleeing storied outlets like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times for censoring coverage critical of Trump. Last week, Jennifer Rubin, the award-winning columnist for the Washington Post, resigned with these words:

“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.”

So this is why I say that today, we cross into unknown territory. This is not business as usual, this does not represent the normal swings and backlashes of democracy, and no, people who care about the well-being of the people and the planet are not overreacting. How far will Trump and his MAGA followers go? How many people – immigrants, trans and other LGBTQ people, people of color, women – will they hurt? And how exactly will this harm take place? Will it take place with the stroke of a pen? Will Trump use the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military on domestic soil, to target his political opponents, critics, protesters and immigrants, as he has threatened to do? Will the harm take place via his hateful rants on social media, which embolden his followers to attack people in vicious crimes of hate? Will the administration worsen an already horrific situation in Palestine by empowering Israel even further? Will they invade Greenland? Will they worsen the already disastrous climate chaos we are experiencing, hastening the deaths of untold millions of innocent animals, plants, and people?

The United States has, since its founding, expressed an unending and dynamic tension between a quest for democracy and human rights for all on the one hand, and a violent and brutal quest for obscene wealth, domination, power and control – dressed up in the propaganda of democracy, rights, freedom and equality – on the other.

When our Constitution was signed in 1789, it did not establish a democracy, despite modern-day perception. It established minority rule by white, educated, Christian, wealthy men. Only these people were granted suffrage; historians estimate this means that only 2-16% of the population could vote. In some colonies, even Catholic men were barred from voting! Our nation was not founded as a democracy: it was founded as an oligarchy with institutionalized race-based, sex-based, wealth-based, and religious-based political power. (This explains why the rightwing has worked so hard to advance the relatively new invention of constitutional originalism, claiming that any attempt to deviate from the letter and intent of the Constitution as written in 1789 is illegal and un-American.)

Additionally of course, our nation was built upon the backs of violently enslaved and tortured Blacks, and upon the stolen land of murdered and imprisoned native peoples. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, in her groundbreaking book Caste, wrote that Hitler and his close associates deeply admired the U.S.:

Hitler “praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived… The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans… Hitler especially marveled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’” (p. 81)

In fact, Hitler admired America so much that he and his closest associates pored over racist American laws and writing, looking to institutionalize racism into the laws of the Third Reich, while parroting that uniquely American innocence. In 1916, American eugenicist Madison Grant wrote a manifesto on cleansing the U.S. gene pool of supposedly inferior races, advocating for a rigid system of sterilization and racial quarantining to eliminate “worthless race types.” Hitler wrote Grant a personal note of gratitude, telling him, “The book is my bible.” (Wilkerson, pp. 80-81)

So the threads of extremism, racism and fascism run through our history all the way back to its inception. But so also does another story, the story we are more familiar with, the story the U.S. prefers to project outward to the world, and inward to our citizens and our schoolchildren. The founding fathers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have unalienable rights, and that the government’s purpose is to protect those rights and promote the common welfare.

It is the Declaration of Independence that lifts our hearts, that makes us believe that a better nation (and world) is possible, that gave rise to the notion of the American Dream. In penning these words, the founding fathers released a vision that flew far and wide, inspiring untold numbers of people – African Americans, Native Americans, women, the working class, LGBTQ people, people of diverse religious faiths, as well as people all over the world – to fight for their rights and win historic victories over the centuries.

So, if the social, political and economic history of the United States can be understood as a perpetual and dynamic tension between greed, violence, racism, fascism, patriarchy and oligarchy on the one hand, and struggles for rights, justice, and freedom for all on the other, one way of framing the question we face today is: will the tides of fascism and oligarchy engulf us once and for all? Will we even get to vote for a president in four years?

These are the questions I am grappling with, and I know I am not alone. I see it in my loved ones. I see it as I sit across from my psychotherapy clients and hold space for their fear and despair. And of course, many of us are seeing it in the writings of journalists and thought leaders around the globe.

But alongside these questions and fears, something else has been growing in me. I feel a growing determination to no longer remain silent, but rather to find and use my voice. A determination to discern what is mine to do in this struggle – in addition to working with clients – and to do it. A determination to engage in an activism that is rooted in loving connection with the Earth and all beings. And a determination to encourage all of you who yearn for a better world to find your voices and purposeful action as well.

That something, that thing that is growing in me, is power.

It is not the power the Trumps and Musks of the world wield. It is not the kind of power that requires the subjugation of others. It is the power to create, to embody one’s unique purpose in life to help others, the power to express love in action.

The other night, I was meditating outside in the dark, simply being present with the brilliant sky, and I heard these words come out of nowhere:

“They don’t own the stars.”

I felt the truth in them – a truth bigger than the words or even the stars themselves. I knew in my bones that this voice was also telling me: They don’t own your soul. They don’t own your heart. They cannot take your free will, your will to act with love; the only way they can take this power from you is if you give it to them willingly.

As I sat there in revelation, I felt a still and silent connection with the Earth, the stars, the plants, the animals, and the humans all over the world who yearn to live lives of balance and harmony with all life. There are so many of us! The trees do not want to burn. Nor do the deer, the rabbits, the birds and chipmunks. The whales do not want to die in oceans of plastic. I flashed on memories of meeting environmental activists from every corner of the world when I worked for Global Greengrants Fund. I met with Chinese activists and Russian activists. Ecuadoran and Nigerian. I knew that people on the other side of the world, in that moment of night in the West, were spending their day actively working to protect their lands from pollution and climate change. People in every country – fascist or not!

We are so many!

And so, as we move into the unknown, I invite you, I implore you, to find and cultivate your own power. What gifts and resources do you have? Are you an artist, a musician, a poet who can support local organizing? Do you have talents with social media, graphic design, and marketing? Do you have a willingness to show up for people who are in the crosshairs of the incoming administration? Are there local organizations who are already working on this and can tell you how they need you to show up? Do you have the willingness to learn? Are you willing to tear your eyes away from social media and instead put time into making your community a better place? Do you tend to isolate when you feel despair and fear, and if so, are you willing to pull together a local group of friends and brainstorm ideas? Do you have a boring job where you can actually put some of your on-the-clock time into helping people? Are you calm in the face of conflict and ready to train or hone those skills and volunteer?

If you are already fighting the good fight, if you already, for example, work for an environmental or social justice nonprofit, you might ask: how can I make our work more effective? How can we form coalitions with groups working on other issues, to magnify our voices and power? How can I carve out some time to work not just on global issues, but on those affecting my community right here? How can we change how we speak, so that we unite more people around our shared values and vision rather than creating polarization and division? What emotional or spiritual work can I do to cultivate love and power in myself, rather than blame and victimization?

To support you in reclaiming and building your power, in the coming weeks I will be writing on the top ten ways in which I witness loving people giving our power away, and in the process, unconsciously helping fascism and oligarchy, racism and patriarchy, to win. I will also discuss antidotes to these power leeches — in other words, ways in which you can reclaim and grow your power.

In the meantime, let us all remember that this struggle has been going on for centuries, and that each one of us has a role to play, if only we are willing to stand up and claim our power. And if each one of us does, fascism cannot ultimately win.

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P.S. I turn to this poem over and over again when I am feeling afraid and sad for our country. Thank you to the brilliant Langston Hughes, a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy we celebrate today:

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

In a fiery closing statement, the sun threw brilliant light onto the rocky peaks behind me, before slipping beneath the Western range. Silence overtook the birdsong, chittering squirrels, and buzzing insects. An unknown night bird skimmed the surface of the lake; a few moments later, a bat swooped overhead. Stars peeked through the darkening spectrum of blues above.

The air cooled against my skin and I pulled on my jacket, but made no further move. I smiled to myself: tonight, I would savor this sacred pageant, this cadenced surrender to the night. I had no need to scurry around like a frantic chipmunk, gathering my belongings and galloping back down the trail to the safety of my car with its bright headlights and promise of civilization. I felt no urgency because my tent was set up behind me and I had everything I needed for the night.

After awhile, I became aware of an unusual feeling inside of me: peace. For, by letting the sun go without regret, by declining to rush to correct the problem of darkness, sources of tension I didn’t even realize I carried melted into the earth. I opened to the wholeness of life, no longer privileging one half over the other, no longer grasping for comfort, or ease, or noise, or warmth, or light. Peace came when I embraced the whole.

How many times have you honored the fall of night?

This is the question I asked myself a few days ago, on the first day of Winter and the longest night of the year. I had been invited to a Solstice Ceremony, and I felt honored and lucky to be included, as these ceremonies are so rare in the 21^st century United States. And yet, when my friends have actually come together to mark the occasion, the way we have talked about it troubles me. I have felt tension in my core, the same feeling I get when a truth goes unspoken, or when some form of oppression is taking place under cover of silence.

This year, I took time to reflect on my unease. On the longest day of the year, we celebrate the abundance of light. On the longest night of the year, we celebrate the impending return of the light. Twin questions coursed through my mind:

Why are we afraid of the dark?

Why do we fail to celebrate the night?

The tightness in my belly released.

Addicted to light, hating the dark

Many, many factors set modern humans apart from our ancestors. We have been violently severed from the natural world and our indigenous roots. We no longer need to engage in work which creates the material conditions for our own survival, such as hunting, gathering, chopping our own firewood, building our own tools and homes. Because of this, we no longer work together in community to meet these needs. And for the first time in 300,000 years of human history, artificial light is available to us at all times, in an infinite variety of forms, without any effort required.

From the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night, we turn on lights. You could map your day by mapping your use of light: your phone alarm wakes you and you look at the bright screen. You turn on a bedside lamp, pull yourself out of bed, stumble to the bathroom and flip on the overhead light. You head to the closet and flip on the light while you dress. Then the hallway light, then the kitchen light, and on and on and on.

There is a word for a substance or activity that we believe we require nearly all the time, but which is not actually necessary for survival: addiction. We are addicted to light.

This addiction is not only physical. We are also addicted to a rigid mental or conceptual framework, and our conceptual framework has deeply imprinted our values. At least as far back as the so-called Enlightenment, Westerners have associated light with goodness, knowledge, science, rationality, literacy, intelligence, civilization, safety, white skin, God, angels, spirit, love, morality, and maleness. We have associated darkness with the “Dark Ages”, Africa (the “Dark Continent”), Black people, indigenous people, evil, ignorance, illiteracy, stupidity, superstition, irrationality, wilderness, “untamed” nature, women, witches, immorality, sin, Satan, hatred, anger, fear, mystery, and animals we fear, such as wolves.

Why does it matter?, you might ask. Well, like most addictions, this one comes with its own unique set of severe consequences. To fuel our light addiction, we drill, we frack, we mine, especially in lands populated by people of color; we destroy the sacred lands and lives of indigenous peoples, not to mention the lives of untold numbers of animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and entire species. You could frame the entire environmental destruction of our planet, including present-day climate chaos, as originating in our addiction to, and worship of, light. (For an absolutely stunning new memoir by an indigenous woman who took on big oil and won major victories, a story that may well change the way you think about our Western lifestyles forever, please read We Will Be Jaguars, by Nemonte Nenquimo.)

Our binary conceptual/emotional/spiritual framework also has grave consequences. Cleaving the world into two halves, one light/good/rational/civilized and the other dark/bad/irrational/savage, provided white American and European men the moral ground they needed to justify genocide, colonialism, systemic racism, slavery, and the violent exploitation and control of women and nature.

The consequences of this polarizing framework are not just in the distant past. A month before she died in 2020, Black Unitarian Universalist Rev. Dr. Hope Johnson wrote:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about how tired I am of hearing words that include black, dark, and more, used in a negative way even as we proclaim that Black Lives Matter… As I reflect on the negative definitions of darkness I am struck by how easy it is to internalize them in many different ways.”

In addition to the emotional pain this causes, it doesn’t take much of a leap to wonder whether this dualist construction of morality causes physical pain, up to and including imprisonment and death, for people of color. Studies already demonstrate conclusively that Americans, no matter our skin color, unconsciously associate Black people with immorality and white people with morality. Now think about how that would impact a police officer with a gun, or a public defender when deciding how much time and attention to give to a case. Police shoot and kill Black people more than three times the rate at which they shoot and kill white people; public defenders are more likely to prioritize cases involving white defendants. While some police officers and lawyers may be overtly racist, many may be acting unconsciously on the implicit bias instilled in us from the moment of our birth, to associate dark skin with criminality or immorality, and white skin with innocence and morality.

Given the whole story, the unfathomably violent truth of how our addiction to light is made manifest, does endless artificial light truly make our lives better? Or is this addiction just another example of how modern Westerners have prioritized physical comforts for an exclusive few over the love of all beings, and in the process, how we have traded away the well-being of our souls?

So, as I return to the questions about why we’re afraid of the dark and why we fail to celebrate the night, I hear the famous song from South Pacific playing in my head: “You have to be carefully taught!” We have been carefully taught to fear the dark for, at minimum, hundreds of years. And if that begs the question — why were we taught to fear the dark? — we need only look at who benefitted from our fear: white men capitalized on it to become obscenely wealthy, by taking the lives, land, and freedom of everyone else.

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It does not have to be this way.

We can come back to harmony between light and dark.

In his revelatory memoir, Of Water and Spirit, Malidoma Somé points the way to a new way of relating to the dark. If you have not encountered his story before, a brief background: Malidome Somé was a medicine man, author and teacher whose purpose in life was to build bridges between his indigenous people, the Dagura tribe in Burkina Faso, West Africa, and the people of the modern West.

When he was four years old, Somé was kidnapped by Jesuit missionaries and taken to a seminary to be trained as a priest. There, he was violently forced to abandon his indigenous traditions, language, and knowledge. At age twenty, he escaped and found his way back to his village, where his elders then faced a challenging decision: what should they do with this highly educated young man who couldn’t even speak his own language and knew nothing about survival? I won’t spoil it for you, but the rest of the book describes the life-changing process of Somé’s reintegration and initiation into his tribe.

During the limbo period when his elders were deciding what to do, Somé learned some painful truths about how his people perceived him. For one, they did not trust him because he could read and write:

They understood literacy as an eviction of a soul from its body—the taking over of the body by another spirit. Wasn't the white man notorious in the village for his brutality, his lack of morality and integrity? Didn't he take without asking and kill ruthlessly? To my people, to be literate meant to be possessed by this devil of brutality. (p. 167)

Secondly, his people did not trust him because he used an oil lamp at night:

Among the Dagara, darkness is sacred. It is forbidden to illuminate it, for light scares the Spirit away. Our night is the day of the Spirit and of the ancestors, who come to us to tell us what lies on our life paths. To have light around you is like saying that you would rather ignore this wonderful opportunity to be shown the way. To the Dagara, such an attitude is inconceivable. The one exception to this rule is a bonfire. Though they emit a powerful glow, they are not prohibited because there is always drumming around them, and the beat of the drum cancels out the light.

Villagers are expected to learn how to function in the dark. I was given light because I had lost the ability to deal with darkness, and each time people saw the timid light of the shea-oil lamp in my room, they would walk away from it as if it signaled the presence of someone playing with the elements of the cosmos. (pp. 175-176)

Oh, how my mind was blown when I first read these passages! Light and literacy, inextricably linked and universally portrayed as good in my culture, were seen as the very opposite in the Dagura culture. I thought about how I had been trained since I was a young child to look down on illiterate people as uneducated, and, I’m embarrassed to admit, stupid. I thought of all the summer reading campaigns of elementary school, which rewarded me for reading as many books as possible, teaching me that I was good and virtuous for spending time with books, while spending time outside connecting with nature was, apparently a waste of time.

I imagined young Malidoma, similarly conditioned, reading by the light of his shea oil lamp, while his tribespeople walked around confidently and skillfully in the dark, opening up to direct spiritual revelation. I realized that his tribespeople weren’t ignorant, that the supposedly dumb space of illiteracy wasn’t a blank, a lack, a void – or darkness. Rather, that space was filled with spiritual literacy. That, while Western kids develop book literacy, these people developed spiritual and nature literacy. And they saw these literacies as going hand in hand with making friends with the dark.

I have a way to understand this dark literacy from my own experience. In my spiritual tradition, I engage in a form of prayer called shamanic journeying. It is very different from the way I was taught to pray as a child: thanking God for my family and belongings and etc., and asking Him for help when I needed it. With Christian prayer, for me at least, it was forever a one-way monologue: I never received a response.

But with shamanic journeying, two-way communication ensues! The language used by the Spirit Helpers, or angels, or God or Goddess (this is not a fundamentalist path - people from all spiritual backgrounds can learn to pray in this way), is one of internal visions, words spoken in the mind, emotion, and, most importantly, inner knowing. Put another way, it is a language of the loving heart. And because the communication happens internally through direct revelation, without relying on sermons or exegesis from a religious authority, or even referring to a Book, it happens in the dark. When I sit down to enter the altered state of consciousness of a shamanic journey, I close my eyes. If it is light outside, I may even cover my eyes with a washcloth or bandana. Light impedes the process.

And so, when I read Somé’s words, I thought of the spiritual awakening that had happened for me, when I finally put down all of my books and phones and tablets, and turned off the lights.

So you see, it really doesn’t have to be this way! Other cultures teach us that we need not remain out of balance, that there is a path to wholeness, that we can learn to love and appreciate the dark. Now, this is crucial: I am not advocating for flipping the binary hierarchy of value upside down. I am not suggesting that we switch from worshipping the light to worshipping the dark. What I am suggesting is that our addiction to the light has created a terrible, violent imbalance both in the world, and in our own bodies and souls. If we wish to heal both, we must synthesize a new harmony.

As the Unitarian Universalist religious educator Jaqui James wrote:

“The words black and dark don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. The words white and light don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. Imagine a world that had only light—or dark. We need both. Dark and light. Light and dark.”

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Practice

If you feel the truth of this in your heart, consider making some friendly overtures to the dark (a New Year’s Resolution, perhaps?). You need not backpack to a remote part of the wilderness in order to do so. Here are some simple suggestions to get you started. If you have other ideas, please take a moment to share them with this community in the comments!

• Take a chair, sit down right outside your house, and bear witness to the miracle of nightfall. Pay attention to the changes that take place: the darkening skies, the changes in sounds, the emergence of birds or other wildlife you might not see or hear during the day. Notice how it feels in your body, to accept the transition without resistance. Try embracing it with gratitude!

• Allow night to fall inside your own living space. Simply be present and resist temptation to turn on lights and screens. While some people may want to make this a lengthy, immersive experience, it need not be. You can set aside just a few minutes before returning to your familiar lifestyle. (As a simple corollary to this suggestion, by all means cultivate mindfulness around turning off lights when you are not using them!)

• If you live in a safe neighborhood and are in a position to trust your body’s abilities, you might consider taking a walk in the dark, bringing a flashlight only in the event that you need it. Try navigating by the faint light of the stars or moon. Bend your knees more than usual for extra shock absorption on uneven ground, and feel the Earth beneath your shoes for information to guide you.

• If you are a parent with young children and hardly have time to think, much less add anything new to your routine: most young children are less conditioned than adults to fear the dark, especially when outside in nature with you. You can try these activities with them – and you just might find that not only do they love the challenge, they can become your teachers!

• Try journaling on the gifts of darkness. For those of you trained in shamanic journeying, try a journey on the gifts of the dark and/or night. In both cases, be sure to avoid the pitfall of equating darkness with bad/shadow/the so-called “dark” side of human nature. If you find yourself caught in this mental construct, you can also try asking for help from your Spirit Helpers to free yourself from this destructive and polarizing binary (and you thought polarized thinking is new?).

• And finally, if you feel called to celebrate the Solstices and Equinoxes in the coming year, make room for celebrating the gifts of the light and the dark. Along with celebrating the abundance of light and the return of the light, try celebrating the abundance of dark, and the return of the dark! Celebrate the sacred, life-affirming harmony between the two. Step away from the Solstice fire for a few moments, look up at the brilliant night sky, and make friends with the night.

In the end, this is about reclaiming balance and wholeness in ourselves and for the planet. It is past time to befriend the dark.

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Sources and Gratitudes

“How did ‘white’ become a metaphor for all things good?”, by Aradhna Krishna, July 6, 2020.
”Darkness and Light: Updated Personal Perspectives,” by Hope Johnson, October 19, 2020.
”Dark and Light, Light and Dark,” by Jacqui James, January 21, 2015.
”Dark and Light: Practicing Balance — and Countering Racism — in Metaphors,” by Alex Kapitan, Dec. 21, 2020.
”Mapping fatal police violence across U.S. metropolitan areas: Overall rates and racial/ethnic inequities, 2013-2017,” by Gabriel L. Schwartz and Jaquelyn L. Jahn, June 24, 2020, and the page summarizing the findings in more readable (non-academic) English.
“Implicit Bias,” webpage posted by National Initiative for Building Community, Trust & Justice.

Of Water and Spirit, by Malidoma Somé, 1994.
The Death of Nature, by Carolyn Merchant, 1980.

And thank you to those of you who take the time to comment and share this piece. You make my writing better, and are building a community of people who care about nature and humanity.

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If we surrendered 
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
                   -Rainer Maria Rilke

Hello, and welcome! I am delighted that you are here and sincerely hope that I can be of service to you.

When you subscribe to this page, you will receive stories, perspectives and practices that draw from nature-based spiritual paths, particularly shamanism and animism, to assist you in getting unstuck from a depressed, apathetic, or helpless place, and empower you to take soulful action for a kinder and more harmonious world. I have been practicing shamanic journeying and nature-based psychotherapy for twelve years; in addition to these modalities, I will also draw on my experience in peacemaking, history, philosophy, media literacy, and activism.

Why nature? Why spirituality? Why action? And how are they all related?

These are big questions, and I have lived within these questions for the past 25 years of my life. In the first twelve years of my career, I worked for progressive nonprofits focused on independent media, environmental sustainability, women’s human rights, and social justice. In the second twelve years of my career, I have practiced nature-based psychotherapy and shamanic journeying. Over these years, I have become increasingly convinced that the activist and spiritual approaches to creating a better world must not be severed from one another: they are two halves of a beating, vibrant whole.

Without authentic spirituality and soul, attempts to create change can become self-righteous, condescending, egoic, tunnel-visioned, polarizing, exhausting, and sometimes even vicious. But practicing spirituality divorced from meaningful action can become a self-indulgent path of ecstasy.

And so, as I enter the 25^th year of my working life, and my 50^th year on this planet, I seek to bring these two halves together through these writings. Thank you for embarking on this journey with me!

Who are these writings for?

If you are interested in the questions I posed above, then these writings are for you. If you are someone who yearns for, and is willing to strive for, the well-being, dignity, and freedom of all beings – where “all beings” really means all, includes people of all races, classes, genders, sexualities, religions, immigration status, political affiliations and other axes of identity, as well as animals, plants, and the Earth herself – then these writings are for you.

If you are someone who has noticed that you feel better in the natural world, and are curious about how to bring that indescribable goodness into everyday life, both for your own sake, as well for the saking of helping others, then these writings are for you.

It doesn’t matter whether you are Christian, Jewish or Muslim, whether you are Wiccan or practice shamanism, whether you are atheist or agnostic or anything else. When I first discovered the nature-based spiritual path known as shamanic journeying some 15 years ago, I myself was an agnostic, and continued to be for quite some time. People of all faiths have discovered that the wisdom of nature, and nature-based spirituality, can be integrated into their larger spiritual traditions. (I will explain what I mean by shamanism and nature-based spirituality in future posts.)

But, while your particular spiritual orientation doesn’t matter, your heart does. In order to benefit from these writings, you must be willing to drop out of your critical mind and into your heart, and leave behind the all-too-common cognitive orientation of “only one of us can be right, so you must be wrong.” Truth is multi-faceted; all of our lived experiences and hard-fought wisdom combine to form a greater Truth. In other words, there is no room for fundamentalism here – in your or in me.

A note about opening up non-polarized space

We live in a highly polarized society, in an age where the media you’re absorbing is not the same as what I’m absorbing; in some cases, there may be no overlap whatsoever. This state of affairs did not come about by chance. People driven by greed learned a very long time ago that in order to reap obscene profits from a given population, the easiest and cheapest way to do so is to divide and conquer.

We have simply entered the age where that dividing and conquering happens mostly without rifles or chains or legalized discrimination, but rather via words and information technologies.

Because of the subsequent information bubbles we live within, I believe it is not only dangerous, but harmful to make assumptions about a person’s values based on their political affiliation or vote. In fact, I believe one of the most urgent tasks before us is to figure out how to create values-driven spaces, loving space, spaces that are as un-media-ted as possible, rather than continuing to play into the hands of billionaires who profit from our endless division. Creating a values-driven, non-polarized space is one of my intentions with this page.

That said, I will not mince words about the harm that politicians are inflicting on entire populations of people, and the Earth herself, in order to protect people’s feelings. Now is not the time to back down from speaking truths. We must forge common ground rooted in truth and love, not assumptions, misinformation, lies, and hate.

So, what is the Sacred Circle?

Have you ever had an experience in the natural world where reality shifted? Perhaps you were gardening, or lying on the beach after a swim. Or perhaps you had just finished a sweaty hike to the top of a mountain, and you took off your pack, sat down on a rock, and gazed upon ridge after ridge of mountains unfolding beneath you. The only thing you could hear is the wind, and the wind of your own breath. Sweet-smelling mountain fir scented the air. A hawk coasted on the currents below you.

And suddenly, your mind shifted from wanting to capture this scene on your phone so you could show all your friends, to experiencing the precious sacredness of all life. Your critical mind blessedly dropped away, and you felt connected to the Earth beneath you, the sky above you, to the clouds in the distance and the trees undulating along every ridge. You felt a part of a grand harmony that is so much bigger than you, and everything was in its rightful place. A deep love for all life blossomed in your heart. You felt in your bones that you are no better than, and no less than, any other being on the planet, and this was sweet relief. You could be exactly, authentically who you are, and you belonged.

There are many ways to describe these experiences. Some call this the web of life; some call this God. Wilderness therapists use the impossibly unpoetic phrase, “peak experience” (sometimes I wonder if psychologists choose the driest possible descriptors on purpose).

The words I have come to use, to point to experiences like these, are “the Sacred Circle.”

But then what? In the modern world that we have constructed, we hike back down from the mountain, hop into our cars, and before we know it, we’re speeding along at 55 mph back to our tragically disconnected modern lives.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I believe these so-called peak experiences are so much more than a single moment. They are a call. A call from God, a call from the Earth Mother, a call from Spirit or your truest, most authentic self, your soul. You are being beckoned to join the Sacred Circle of life in a more intentional way. To live your life as though the lives of every being, from the largest whale to the tiniest ant, are sacred.

And indeed, the Sacred Circle can become a way of life. Like meditation or prayer, we can learn to practice this spiritual experience daily. It can become a value system, a way of guiding our decisions, from small to large to everything in between. It poses beautiful, challenging questions, such as: What do you want to do with your life? What is your purpose? How do you want to show up as a friend? How do you want to show up for your community? Will you choose to drive alone or make the extra effort to carpool? If you have the economic means, will you choose to prioritize installing granite counter tops, or solar panels? Do you advocate for policies that protect the Earth? Do you vote to protect the Earth and the lives of all beings? Do you eat your breakfast as though it is a collection of products from the grocery store, or do you receive it as a gift? When you are lying on your deathbed, what might you regret – and what changes can you make now to prevent that?

Fearlessly asking these questions, and seeking evermore to live our lives by the answers that bubble up from our souls, is the essence of living in belonging with, in integrity with, the Sacred Circle. Or, if you will, the Sacred Circle Way.

I will write much more about this in the months to come, but before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that, while this way of describing this experience may be new, the concept is very much not new. We are essentially talking about the religion, philosophy, and way of life of indigenous peoples. And, while white people were indigenous at one time, we have become utterly severed from our own indigenous roots. We are like orphans of the Sacred Circle, Adam and Eve cast out of the garden. (There are many other racial groups who have become disconnected from their indigeneity as well, but I will only speak to my experience as a white person.)

So, many of the people who are advancing these ideas today are Native American teachers and leaders. To name and honor just a few of these voices: In her stunning book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this way of life and invites us into it, including, urgently, those of us who are descendants of settlers and colonists. In Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth, Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez offer many powerful, more academic essays on these concepts. In Becoming Rooted, Randy Woodley describes this way of being as the Harmony Way, and offers very short chapters and practices. The Red Road is a Native American phrase used to signify “a deep commitment to living life in the best way possible — with an intrinsic respect for others, oneself, and creation and a dedication to worshipping the Creator.” I am so deeply grateful that these thought-and-soul leaders have stepped up to offer their vision in these times.

At this moment in history, with ecosystems all over the world in crisis, I believe we need many voices speaking in different styles, words, and approaches; with this page I seek to speak primarily to those of us who have been orphaned from these life-affirming ways.

What can you expect from this page?

You might see a new post every month, or one every week. I’ve spent the past decade working with individuals and very small groups, and am new to publicly writing from the heart. I cannot anticipate my creative flow.

But I can anticipate content. Here are some of the topics you can expect to see sooner or later on this page:

• Choosing joy in a broken world;

• Dancing with aggression: how to stay strong when faced with cruelty, greed and violence;

• Nature-sized change: gathering your community to create localized change;

• The power of vision: the why and how of envisioning a better world;

• A nature-based model of Truth in a time of disinformation and polarization;

• Why overcoming toxic polarization is crucial not only for the health of our democracy, but also for the safety of targeted populations;

• Resistance, repair and the middle way;

• and many pieces on Living the Sacred Circle.

If you have made it this far, thank you for the precious gift of your time and attention. Please introduce yourself in the comments, and let me know what you care about! What resonated with you? Do you have any additional topics you’d like to see addressed? And please share this with people who you think will be served by these writings.

Much respect and gratitude to you.

Kris

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