Self Awareness is a political act

Photo by Arthur Brognoli on Pexels

The tactic of “flooding the zone” isn’t only about engendering fear and exhausting movement building. It’s also an effort to both normalize and render spellbinding the presence or threat of violence.

There’s actual violence, and then there’s threatened violence that doesn’t materialize. Sometimes it seems like the retraction is a response to protests, or lawsuits, or counter-threats. Sometimes it’s whimsical; the capriciousness designed to demonstrate the vast distance between the people who have the power to order violence and those who are here to absorb it.

The scale of the violence, and the way it's constantly coming at us, albeit in changing garb, carries with it the threat of adaptation: that we’ll find a way to get used to it, shrug our shoulders if it doesn’t directly impact us or those we care about. To become inured to violence is to join in with the sadism. To refuse to adapt—to see each threat, each cruelty, and to stay with it—this can become so absorbing that it blots out our capacity to function, to be there for ordinary life.

And even “ordinary” life is becoming blurry.

There’s events that happen in ordinary life, like a job loss, or an imprisonment, or an illness. But these events can also be attached to the unfolding mayhem of the present: a job lost because  USAID was destroyed; an imprisonment because a student is protesting; a child’s liver damaged because her parents heeded advice from HHS and gave her Vitamin A to prevent measles. The “same” event, vibrating with portent, because of its context.

Do these events have the same moral valence, if their contexts are different? How are we supposed to deal with the ordinary but significant events we’ve always had—deaths, funerals, weddings, caregiving, illnesses, graduations, celebrations—and the enormity of events that feel like they’re newly raining down upon us, or worse, intensifying sufferings that have histories and legacies that stretch back to the founding of the United States? Is it all just the soup of existence? Or is there something worthwhile about seeing these things as separable, understood through different theoretical lenses, requiring different responses?

I take this snapshot of the U.S. right now because I think it’s worthwhile to describe the complexity and depth of what any of us might be carrying, even if what we’re experiencing in the present is an “ordinary” day. In fact, the schism between the ordinaryness—or even the joy and beauty—of any particular day and the fact of what is also happening alongside it can lend a surreal aspect to mundane tasks like grocery shopping, or blowing out birthday candles, or just looking up at a blue sky through pink dogwood blossoms.

In all of this, how do we find a ground of self awareness? 

I use “self” here, rather than just “awareness,” the usage common to many contemplative practices, because part of the design of the above forms of psychological warfare is to obliterate self knowing, and with it, our connection to our core ethics, and to our purpose and value, the motivations that help us stay alive and take action.

“Self” here refers to the ground of existence, and not to the ego, the overlay, the noise of consciousness and momentary emotional states that pass through us and are often reactions to whatever has momentarily taken hold of our attention. I am also bringing the word self in here because though in many philosophical and spiritual traditions, aspects of self like identity or sexuality are said to be constructs that obscure our access to a deeper true nature, in the present moment these constructs are also being used to target people for violence and oppression, and to deny them rights that are predicated on the idea that they have a self that deserves protection. 

To achieve and celebrate a self is work, if that self is targeted for obliteration.

This is a moment when so many people are being told and are experiencing the stripping away of our rights, the decimation of our histories, the denigration of our value, the scorn of our beauty, and the refusal to allow us to contribute to this nation. Though these efforts are in some ways a continuation of longstanding efforts to strip particular groups of their civil rights, they are also new. The ways that cruelty and violence are currently represented as transgressive, as daring, as sexually potent rebellions against a repressive and dogmatic regime of domination—the upending and co-opting of liberation discourse—means that the very language that gave marginalized people a sense of longstanding spiritual and philosophical belonging is now wavy and distorted, put through a fun house mirror.

To return to the self, in its deepest knowing, to take the time to find that place and return to it, daily, sometimes hourly, is a profoundly political act. There are many ways to engage in the practice of self awareness. For some, it is sitting meditation, or listening to music in the dark, or making something—a garden, a bookshelf, a painting, a cake—or walking and trying to see something new. To drop down, below our thinking mind, gives us access to wisdom that is categorically different from the kind of knowing that is necessary to navigate our ordinary lives. 

When we are in wordless connection with self, we can access a multiplicity of information channels: our energy bodies; our surface and deeper feelings; our physical sensations of pain or hurt or tension or release; the ways our body is at once separate from existence and also interconnected with it. We can experiment with these boundaries between ourselves and others, recognizing the ways we need and rely on people who we haven’t even met, whose daily actions help us survive and how all of us depend upon the more than human world. These practices take us into deep time, into a capaciousness in the present that is rooted not only in our own core ethics and purpose, but in the legacy of our ancestors and those who will follow us.

When we are using our skills to navigate and discern the best ways to survive and to protect those we care for, it is easy to lose touch with this other capacity of self. It is easier to become vulnerable to stories that want us to believe we have no value; that we are unwanted; that we are hated or misunderstood or that people take joy in our suffering. These stories are designed to immobilize us, psychically, politically, collectively. But there is a part of you that is outside all of this, or below it, or wherever you can find it. All you have to do is show up.