Engaged Liberation

Arshiya Kherani is my brilliant friend, a serial entrepreneur, a change maker, and a truly beautiful soul. We both share this deep love and understanding of personal story, and how powerful it is, how telling ones story can heal, not only self, but community, while simultaneously building and strengthening community. It’s this love of story that led her to be one of the founders of PotLuck Stories - a series of live events that are so much fun, all about community and story.

Enjoy xo

This is one of my absolute favorite conversation on Liberation. Jorge embodies and own his liberation proudly. Jorge R. Gutierrez is a brilliant storyteller and artist, Emmy winner, filmmaker, and overall well of wisdom and genius.

I have known him for a minute, but it was this quote on his inspiring twitter that made me reach out for a convo, “After Bo…

In other words, what’s gonna happen is gonna happen regardless of whether we are anxious about it or not. Like death, what’s coming is coming. I’m not saying ignore it, or just put it off in the back of your mind and say, I’ll consider that later.

No, consider it now. But, why get anxious about it? Why not open your heart to it, let it in, let this moment in. Letting it in, opening our hearts to all of it - is going to enable us to actually receive this moment and not defend ourselves all the time. We waste a lot of time and energy in anxiousness. Which is really just some sort of self-defense from a future full of things we can not control (aka, nothing, there is nothing that is truly in our control). Anxiety is the illness of our time, and it comes primarily from our inability to live in the present moment, and our need to control things.

Today’s Liberation is free for all, but it didn’t write itself. If you’re enjoying these posts & find value in their information, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I understand why we’re anxious - capitalism, war, rent, forever chemicals in our water, climate, student loans…. I get it, but also, our tension around these things will not serve us or the issues that need our spacious loving attention. I believe that if we can carry less anxiety, less tension, then we can have more spaciousness to respond creatively and more compassionately to the moment, to whatever this moment needs. We would have more spaciousness to be able to face what is and not need to turn away. More spaciousness to be moved to action, not simply moved to habits that protect us and keep us “safe.”

A life without anxiety or fear may seem like an impossible dream, but it is possible, and it is also within our grasp. We can, through the practice of awareness and liberation, find spaciousness from the grip of anxiety, anger, and despair.

And from that place, that calm, loving, spacious, even peaceful place, may we all take loving action.

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love. But it is labor. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $5/mo, you’ll gain access to weekly group meetings, as well as full access to the Engaged Liberation podcast. Thank you!

Thank you for reading Engaged Liberation.

But we love the drag, we love the human costume. We think it’s the peak physical experience, s**t, we think it’s the peak experience experience. We think it’s what we are.

We fall into our characters, costumes and roles so deeply that we get stuck in them.

We make internet bios and wikipedia pages dedicated to our characters. “Chris does this, is this, doesn’t do this, loves this, hates this, has these traumas, is this productive, has these routines…”

Our battle for liberation on this physical plane is in our obsession with trying to be solid when in fact we are mush. We try and become secure in our characters, in the performance of “me” by any means necessary. But we are not these fixed beings, we’re not a box or category that we try and fit ourselves into. We’re just giant balls of mush.

Formless and expansive, capable of much more than we can even convince of. Mush - one moment this and the next moment that. Much more spacious than any label or instagram bio can ever contain.

Physics says that you can never actually touch anything. What!? If you're reading this right now, it's a sure bet that you’re touching something, your cellphone, laptop, chair, desk, a nice plush bed with high thread count (we can dream, right?) - but you aren't actually touching it.

Everything you can see, touch, and "feel" is made up of infinitesimally small parts of matter. Even objects that appear to be stationary (including you) are in fact vibrating mush. Oscillating and resonating, billions of particles vibrating so fast we think we’re one solid thing, but we’re not. Microscopically, all sorts of strange things are going on within us that aren't perceivable to the human eye…

We aren’t meant to be this solid, composed, single fixed identity, feeling and mindset thing - we are mush, we are gods in drag - so much more than any one thing we tell ourselves we are. We can feel so much more, love so much more, have so much more gratitude.

But it’s hard to be mush, hard to be this vibrating full of potential thing, the character feels a lot safer, I’ve rehearsed it a lot more.

Today’s Liberation is free for all, but it didn’t write itself. If you’re enjoying these posts & find value in their information, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I think liberation lies in the mush, the place beyond the story about who we are, and what we are, and what we should be or do. In order to find this place, Zen practitioners will use the famous koan, “What is your original face?”

It is a koan (a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment) used to drop the stories and structures we believe as “self” and enter into a connection with ultimate existence.

In her 1974 essay 'Seeing,’ Annie Dillard writes about the experiences of a group of people blind from birth who recovered their sight after cataract operations in the nineteenth century. Their brains hadn't ever learned how to make sense of visual information and so for a time they saw the world unprocessed and unsorted. They saw mush - a depthless dazzle of color patches, some bright and some so black they looked like holes. Trees glowed like flames. And each person had a wildly unique face.

If only someone had given them brushes, Dillard writes, “then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason.” The world as expansive mush.

xo

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This week I got to chat Liberation with the one and only Liz Plank, author of For The Love of Men, and the brilliant voice and thinker behind Airplane Mode (a must subscribe)!

Enjoy! xo

Engaged Liberation is a labor of love. But it is labor. If you love it, support it for less than $5/mo. Thank you!

Om is a beautiful and brilliant friend and Ayurvedic Chef based in Los Angeles. We are often found climbing together for hours (he’s a spider monkey) and chatting Liberation, so it felt fitting to share some of his wisdom with y’all. Enjoy.

Anytime I am able to chat with Paula, it is a good day. Paula is the founder of EMPRESS, a community-building agency dedicated to leveraging the power of culture to create a meaningful impact & build stronger communities! And she does leave meaningful impact and build community. I’ve felt it personally. She threw the greatest concert I have ever been too - life changing.

Enjoy her genius. xo

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Reta and I chat healing, surrender, and how all of it is sacred- all of it!

Reta Moretti is the founder of Sacred Sisters and Creatrix Coaching. A certified life coach, yoga and meditation instructor, Reta seamlessly blends these modalities to guide individuals on transformative journeys to create a holistic approach to personal empowerment, connection to Self and connection to Mother Nature. Her expertise extends to community building, social media management, retreat planning, and spiritual entrepreneurship.

Through her women’s collective, Sacred Sisters, Reta is devoted to fostering a sense of deep, loving sisterhood among women, by providing a space for healing the wounds and dispelling the notions that pit women against each other as competitors. She is dedicated to guiding women on a path of inner knowing, empowerment and self discovery.

Engaged Liberation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A in-process showing from Act II of, Rough Magic, an Operatic Ritual

The transcript:

Again, you have to be logical. You know, if I know in this hotel room, they have food every day and I'm knocking on the door every day to eat and…

Engaged Liberation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The world comes to you.

But also, the world also comes from you. 

What?

Think of it like this - when you’re in a rush, everybody is moving to slow. Everybody is in your way.

When you just got great news, all the hard work paid off, you got that second date or got that raise, then suddenly everybody is a blessing, everyone is moving at exactly the right pace. 

Plainly put - our internal world reflects our outer world.

When we feel good, the world is good.

When we feel bad, the world is bad.

Chaos breeds chaos, peace breeds peace.

Our relationship to the outer world is often our inner world.

So, if I want Liberation to come to me, I ask, how does it look and feel for Liberation to come from me?

The action doesn’t matter as much as the state with which the action is bred from. If you are in peace, then every action is a peaceful action. If you are love, every action has a chance to be a holy and loving action. If you are full of resentment and hate and anger and the idea of being overlooked, or like there isn’t enough room for them and me, then you get this - - - this current world full of war, delusion, oppression, violence, extremism.

The world comes to you. But also, the world also comes from you. 

And so I ask you:

What world do you want to come to you?

What world do you want to come from you?