Initially, the idea that we have to hide and obscure that we are funding people felt absurd. Then, the concept of “funding people” itself started to feel absurd. Funding people sounds dumb, because why would you need to pay people to exist? (A: capitalism). So, we choose instead to fund projects & programs because it makes us feel like we’re actually DOING something, it makes us feel connected to purpose, like our money is having an “impact.”

^This could have been the whole essay, but unravelling (and unravelling alongside) the absurdities of our time - beyond accepting them with an eyeroll, ranting them in a tweet, or immortalizing them in a meme - feels like the assignment. Here we go!

Before we get into the absurdities of funding, I want to offer us some language and framing.

FRAME 1: MONEY, WORK & PURPOSE

The concepts of money, work, and purpose feature heavily in the process of applying for funding. The following excerpt from a post by Rhythms of Health, traces the ways in which money has changed our relationship to work and purpose.

“Work is the expenditure of energy.

…For most of human history, humans did not work to accumulate money. We expended energy directly toward life.

We gathered to eat.

Built to shelter.

Cultivated to nourish.

Created to contribute and express.

The energy you gave became the food, warmth, protection, medicine, beauty, and belonging.

Your energy moved into the ecosystem, and the ecosystem gave life back.

This is how nature works. The sun does not shine to accumulate light. The river does not flow to become more valuable. The tree does not produce fruit to prove its productivity.

Energy moves toward life and life creates more life.

Then money became the intermediary.

Instead of:

Energy → Life

We increasingly created:

Energy → Money → Choice

Now you could expend your life-force in one place, store its value, and direct it somewhere completely unrelated later. Money created distance between energy and purpose. And inside that distance, something became possible. Human purpose could be redirected. Because when your work no longer reveals what your energy is building, someone else can tell you what to build:

“Get rich”

“Become more productive”

“Lose weight”

“Stay young”

“Go viral”

“Own more”

“Optimize everything’

…And now we have arrived at one of the strangest moments in human history. We expend our energy doing work disconnected from our nature to earn money, then spend that money trying to feel alive again.

We work under artificial light, to afford a vacation in the sun.

We sit inside all day, then pay to move our bodies.

We leave our communities, then pay for belonging.

We override our rhythms, then pay to regulate ourselves.

We spend our life-force participating in conditions that deplete us, then spend the stored value of that life-force trying to heal from how we had to live to earn it.

And we call this normal.”

Absurd, right? Let’s stay with it. If money created distance between energy and our original purpose (i.e. sustaining life), then that distance requires discernment in navigating. We must each ask ourselves:

• Do we still believe the purpose of our work is to sustain life? What does “sustaining life” look like for us? Does it include any of the prescriptions we’ve been given (e.g. get rich, stay young, optimize everything, etc.)?

• Does the work we are doing today reveal what our energy is building? If not, how have we been coping with this disconnect?

• How are we participating in creating the demand for our “healing” by normalizing our depletion?

Aside from the clarity it can provide about my own evolving practice and motivations, I find the process of applying for nonprofit/philanthropic funding largely undignified, by design. During the application process, we expend energy not to accumulate money, but towards the potential of accumulating money to live out a particular purpose. Then, an external body, who often has little to no relationship to us, gets to decide whether that purpose is worthy of that money, and whether and how much of our energy and that money should be extended towards that purpose. If Energy → Money → Choice is the new promise, these oft-restricted funds do not actually allow for that choice. Even if we receive the funds, we do not actually get to spend it on our own terms.

These funding applications often also see purpose as static and individualized. In contrast, “Your purpose is not the thing you do. It’s the thing that happens in others when you do what you do.” (source unknown) Based on this definition, purpose is relational and evolving. Restricted funding - I think deliberately - doesn’t leave room for this relationality and evolution. Restricted funding - I think deliberately - optimizes for control, not agency.

FRAME 2: YIN & YANG

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), everything that is alive in the world contains yin and yang.

Yin refers to matter. It is what gives life structure and substance.

Yang refers to function. It is what animates life and moves that structure and substance.

Yin stores, and yang expends. Yin contains, and yang disperses. Yin is anatomy (form), yang is physiology (function). Yin directs and leads yang to be functional, and yang consumes yin in its motion, which is why substance needs to be regenerative.

The relationship between yin and yang is what creates life itself. Neither is good or bad, rather they are complementary. We need both.

Yin is not just a feeling or a slowing down or an ideology. Yin is material. Blood, fluids (e.g. saliva, cerebrospinal fluid, synovial fluid in our joints, cervical fluid, etc.), and tissue (e.g. bone, muscle, skin, connective tissue) all make up the substance of yin. Yin is physical, nourishing, restorative, and containing. Yin is our internal capacity. The amount of yin available in our bodies determines our ability to create, process, and hold.

According to Rhythms of Health (and I would agree), we are living within systems that disproportionately deplete yin, leaving us yang-dominant. In other words, our systems are running on too little substance for the amount of stimulation, motion, intensity, and change we are trying to hold. Yang dominance looks like force without direction, energy without grounding, movement without structure.

Dr. Gabrielle Naomi proposes that many of our modern approaches to healing do not stick long-term because we are attempting to build a practice on top of depletion - specifically, depleted yin. True healing and integration requires substance and capacity to hold, whereas many healing interventions ask us to expend energy (i.e. activate more yang) without investing in restoring the physical substance that nourishes us (i.e. yin).

While TCM speaks to yin and yang within our bodies and within nature, I think these concepts also apply to our organizations and movements.

Organizational yin is made up of the structures that allows the organization to function (this includes staff, as well as the physical / financial / digital / technical / logistical / governance / relational infrastructure that holds them and the work together). Organizational yang includes the programs and projects that animate, move, and move through these structures.

While both yin and yang are complementary and integral for the optimal function of an organization or movement, there are significant and deliberate discrepancies in how they are funded by philanthropy. Many grants require organizations to limit their operational (yin) spending to an arbitrary 10-15% of the total budget, mandating that the bulk of funds go to programs and projects (yang). It’s giving “you can use this funding to have an event, but none of it can be spent on food.”

“...this is how modern society has treated yin everywhere. We want fruit without the seed, growth without the soil, production without restoration, children without supporting mothers…We keep asking life to produce while removing the structures that allow life to regenerate.” - Dr. Gabrielle Naomi

"We plan for and invest in cultural venues such as theatres and recording studios without planning for affordable housing, daycares, and green spaces. This sends the message that we value art but not the artists…I witnessed firsthand the ways that thinking narrowly about cultural infrastructure and negating artists as whole beings within broader community contexts caused harm. Creative cities care about the actual humans who create them." - Jay Pitter

Within a movement context, aligned and adequate infrastructure (yin) is often the rate-limiting step between mobilization and organization. Yang without adequate yin typically results in short bursts of mass mobilization that fizzle before that energy can be channeled towards building long-term capacity to organize sustainably against the root causes of the issue(s) at hand.

In the same way that the movement of yang consumes yin within our bodies, programs and projects consume organizational yin as they move through their life cycle. This why organizational yin - as with yin in our bodies - needs to be regenerative.

Traditional philanthropy, on the other hand, deliberately underfunds operations (i.e. one manifestation of organizational yin) because rebuilding yin would build our capacity to restore and regenerate, which would threaten the dependency on philanthropy that is needed to maintain the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). As Mohammed Elnaiem of The Decolonial Institute describes, philanthropy is intended to “act as a safety valve in a society that feels like it’s supposed to explode…the alleviation of just enough inequality to keep the system stable.”

In a blogpost titled The Redistribution Imperative, Ivan March of Guerrilla Foundation writes,

“As scholar-activist Dylan Rodríguez argues, the non-profit industrial complex often functions as a “counter-insurgent” formation, channeling revolutionary potential into manageable, fundable projects that do not threaten the underlying capital order…This capital, while often doing marginal good, is structurally prohibited from the kind of non-repayable, no-strings-attached transfer that characterizes true redistribution…[Philanthropy is] a system designed not to fund resistance, but to manage and contain it.”

In other words, the NPIC and philanthropy give just enough funds to keep the work going (yang), but not enough to replenish and rebuild the structures that resource our people (yin). This is why we find ourselves caught in perpetual cycles of burnout. It is also why the “impact” that is created by these grants often does not stick or pales in comparison to the systemic inequalities that continue to worsen our material conditions. We are proposing and implementing programs and projects on the backs of constitutionally depleted people and infrastructure.

OUR OPPONENTS ARE INVESTING IN YIN

Notably and concerningly, our far-right opponents have been investing in building yin - building infrastructure and investing in people - in ways that many of our modern-day leftist formations have struggled to (for all the aforementioned reasons).

On the Practical Radicals podcast, Deepak Bhargava speaks to the training infrastructure that has been built and sustained for the purpose of grooming conservative leaders:

“The size of the apparatus that trains overdogs to do strategy and to understand power is just mind-boggling. Business schools, corporate consulting firms like McKinsey and Company, and conservative leadership training programs that groom people to ascend to the highest levels of every sector, the judiciary, business politics, and NGOs. These operate at a huge scale. The Conservative Leadership Institute has trained 200 000 people who now occupy key positions of power throughout society, united by a common worldview. The motto of the Leadership Institute is: you owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win. There is nothing operating at that scale, with an orientation to both ideology and strategy, on the progressive side. And the vast majority of the literature about strategy is written for overdogs about how to acquire power and how to keep it.

In an episode of the Fliplanthropy series, Ivan March of the Guerrilla Foundation and Mohammed Elnaiem of The Decolonial Centre talk about the ways in which the far-right funds people and their livelihoods (i.e. funding yin) in exchange for their ability to influence and mobilize the masses (i.e. the yang payoff). While these investments in yin may simply be a means to their desired yang end, they still recognize and address the need to invest in and take care of people in order to resource them in getting the work done.

“You’ve basically got a stratum of people around the world right now who have their political origins in the neo-nazi right, who basically have access to unlimited amounts of funds...they’ve got access to multi-year funds...[they’re] a few phone calls away from some of the biggest millionaires who are giving them unrestricted funding to fly where they want, to bring together different groups of people who are on the fringes, to promote scientific racism, to promote political projects…

…“I’m gonna fund your livelihood, I’m gonna give you whatever you need.” It’s beyond unrestricted funding. It’s like “Hey 30-year-old influencer, what do you need to make this happen? What do you need to get people out on the streets?…I have your back. You don’t need to worry about retiring because I got you.” This is a patronage type of relationship that, again, we are so scared of nepotism and non-meritocratic thinking that we end up not creating those kinds of trusting relationships.” - Ivan March

March, Elnaiem, and Bhargava all encourage us to resist the impulse to dismiss our far-right opponents as people we do not want to replicate in any way, and instead study and learn from the ways in which they are effectively out-organizing us.

REVOLUTIONARY MOMENTS INVEST IN YIN

Our opponents aside, the history of revolutionary movements around the world also speaks to the importance of investing in yin - albeit not in those words.

In his book Blood in My Eye, former political prisoner and member of the Black Guerrilla Family George Jackson writes about supporting people’s basic needs (yin) as an integral part of growing the political consciousness needed for revolution (yang).

“Consciousness grows in spirals. Growth implies feeding and being fed. We feed consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic and social needs, working, organizing toward a united national left. After the people have created something that they are willing to defend, a wealth of new ideals and an autonomous subsistence infrastructure, then they are ready to be brought into “open” conflict with the ruling class and its supporters.”

Jackson makes the connection between the investment in yin (i.e. addressing people’s basic needs and building an autonomous subsistence infrastructure) as a prerequisite and foundation for an effective yang mobilization (i.e. people willing to engage in conflict against the state and mobilize in defense of the structures that are materially serving them).

This sentiment is echoed by former Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, in describing the survival programs developed and sustained by the Party to meet people’s daily needs:

We recognized that in order to bring the people to the level of consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be necessary to serve their interests in survival by developing programs which would help them to meet their daily needs. For a long time we have had such programs not only for survival, but for organizational purposes. Now we not only have a breakfast program for schoolchildren, we have clothing programs, we have health clinics which provide free medical and dental services, we have programs for prisoners and their families, and we are opening clothing and shoe factories to provide for more of the needs of the community. Most recently we have begun a testing and research program on sickle-cell anemia, and we know that 98 percent of the victims of this disease are Black. To fail to combat this disease is to submit to genocide; to battle it is survival. All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation. When consciousness and understanding is raised to a high level, then the community will seize the time and deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors. - Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed, p. C (supplement from) Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Saturday, June 5, 1971.

While these interventions are referred to as programs, Newton clarifies that they are a means to a greater end. They are meant to sustain and build the capacity of the people (i.e. building yin) so that they may revolt (i.e. mobilize yang) and overturn the systems that are causing these constitutional deficiencies in the first place. The ultimate goal is not survival, but liberation.

The decision to invest in yin, particularly in moments of crisis, can feel counter-intuitive. It is time-consuming. It requires slowing down for long enough to see a horizon that is further in distance. Crisis demands that we act as if we are going to die today. In contrast, investing in yin asks us to act as if we - ‘we’ the people, not necessarily ‘we’ the individuals - will live to see another day, month, year, or decade.

Investing in yin requires faith - the ability to believe in realities we cannot yet see. It requires diverting what feel like essential resources to the work of building, not just responding. Thuyavan, a medical cadre with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), describes one such decision in his book, War & Medicine:

“During the early stages of the armed struggle for the liberation of our homeland, our wounded soldiers had been transported in small boats to various hospitals in nearby India. That was in the 1980s but the medical resources in India were denied to us when that country turned against us…Being denied access to hospitals in Tamil Nadu, India we became totally dependent on the medical resources of the teaching hospital in Jaffna and on our civilian supporters…our wounded were suffering needlessly and there was no guarantee Jaffna would remain under our control: our movement and our people needed our own medical service. In 1992, the Medical College of Tamil Eelam was inaugurated to provide it.

Seventy cadres were selected to study to become doctors in a programme of study which would run parallel with the curriculum of the medical school of the University of Jaffna. They would follow that curriculum, attend lectures and practical sessions, and undertake the same examinations, but would graduate as doctors from the Medical College of Tamil Eelam. Our students were selected to join the group on the basis of perceived aptitude, not merely on the levels of academic achievement.”

Thuyavan goes on to describe the challenges that came with staying the course and continuing to pursue medical studies as the movement’s battles against the genocidal Sri Lankan state waged on.

“Not everyone finished the medical studies. Five students were killed on the battle front while serving in field hospitals. Some failed to meet the standards and some found it impossible not to take up arms.

Though we had been assigned to study medicine, originally we had all joined the movement to take up arms for Tamil Eelam, a homeland of freedom for Tamils.

…I suffered misgivings about the transfer because I was impatient to join the struggle and it seemed almost a betrayal of my comrades to be on the side-lines, studying for five years.

Our leader, Mr. Pirapaharan, however, addressed our group with words that none of us have forgotten, especially because their truth has been confirmed many times…He said there was a great need for the movement to have its own medical corps and we were to study hard to build it. He did not want us to succumb to the temptation to return to the frontlines, declaring there were greater needs to fulfill. And, in their fulfilment, he promised we would have far greater satisfaction. He prophesied ‘if you save the life of a comrade it will be more satisfying than fighting in many battles.’”

As Thuyavan describes, the investment in building medical capacity - the ability to restore and regenerate those who had been injured - was threatened not only by the material conditions of war, but also by the psychological burden of not being able to fight on the frontlines with their comrades. In the face of this gnawing guilt and impatience, he and his fellow medical students were assured by their leader that their commitment to this work (e.g. building organizational yin) would yield much greater fulfillment in the long-term. The following excerpt from War and Medicine speaks to the incredible capacity that was built as a result of this investment:

“By 1998, the medical corps had grown to sufficient size to be able to administer and staff five military hospitals throughout their region. The movement had trained increasing numbers of non-medical staff, nurses, and medics and had started mobile health clinics and primary health centres for civilians in rural areas...

…By 1999, efficiency of the organisation had increased to the degree that a field hospital could be erected within hours, and in complete secrecy.

…By those years, not only did the movement have better equipment, it also had better staff. Everyone had learned from the ordeals, and medical procedures were now able to be performed with skill and speed unimagined at the beginning of the struggle. The students had seen comrades suffer terrible injuries and it had broken their hearts but they had developed a machine-like expertise and were determined no-one should die under their care.”

The medical service grew and evolved alongside the movement for liberation. Our capacity (yin) must evolve and regenerate alongside our movement (yang).

COMMON PITFALLS THAT ACCOMPANY INVESTING IN (RE)BUILDING YIN

As with all good things, we must be mindful of the potential for overcorrection. Within nature, we regenerate yin so that we have the capacity to contain and direct yang. Within capitalism, however, we have the potential to become navel-gazey and tunnel-visioned about anything, including building infrastructure and investing in people.

Some common pitfalls that can accompany investing in yin include:

1. PARALYSIS BY PROCESS

We may become so absorbed with building the structure perfectly or caught up in deciding on the “right” people to invest in, that we don’t actually move. Ivan March elaborates on this tendency, particularly within progressive movements, in contrast to the strategy employed by our conservative opponents:

“We also have moments where we stall in endless conversation to be as morally right. Coming from a justice perspective, we come from a school of philosophy where we focus on how well we are doing it and how cautious we are, and who’s in the room, and are our processes all right? We’re much more process-focused than we are end results-focused. And what I’m hearing here [re: the other side] is very much results-focused…They’re much more creative in the forms of funding because where we are focused on how egalitarian is it, do we have all the critical skills in the room, are we spreading the pie evenly, are we giving the same amounts to everybody, they just find who’s gonna make the most influence.”

Contrary to popular belief, DEI (diversity, equity & inclusion) is a relationship, not a checklist. And relationships are tested when they are put to work, particularly when they are challenged. A structure or framework or relationship may look diverse, sound inclusive, and speak equitably, but its true capacity is only revealed when it has to respond in the face of adversity. A sound process is important, and after a certain point, clarity comes from action, not thought.

2. SUFFOCATION BY STRUCTURE

Structure, at its best, contains more than it constrains. However, in our quest for certainty and control, many of us have built and/or been subject to structures that are so rigid that they do not actually allow for movement and adaptation. Zuhdae writes extensively about how much of our critique of structure is a trauma response that throws the baby (structure as a whole) out with the bathwater (oppressive structures).

A healthy structure is like a healthy backbone - it holds people together. It is sound enough to contain movement, but not so rigid that it restricts flow. It is risk-aware, not risk-averse. It shields what is vulnerable, without snuffing out what is growing. It creates consistency while still being responsive to change.

“Liberation is not the absence of structure. Liberation is structure that is accountable to the people it serves. Structure that protects rather than controls. Structure that distributes power rather than concentrating it. Structure that survives not because one person is heroically holding it together but because the people inside it built something that can hold itself.” - Zuhdae

3. ATTACHMENT TO INFRASTRUCTURE OVER LIBERATION

Because building infrastructure can be both time- and energy- intensive, we may become attached to the structures we build in ways that ultimately do not serve the goals of liberation. Our efforts may become more about protecting the structure itself vs. moving toward the vision that the structure was meant to propel us toward in the first place.

In a conversation about his book, War & Medicine, Thuyavan shares one of the guiding principles he followed as a medical cadre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: “We practice medicine to win the war.” The Medical College of Tamil Eelam was a structure that was imagined and erected to prolong the resistance movement’s ability to fight for a liberated homeland in Tamil Eelam. Their medical training was an investment made with the intention of saving the lives of fellow fighters so that they could continue fighting for liberation. Their work was grounded not in an attachment to being doctors (which can include beliefs about who a doctor is/isn’t, what they do/don’t do, how they are treated/not treated), but in a commitment to liberation, to winning the war against the genocidal Sri Lankan state. Both in practice and in ideology, every medical cadre was a fighter before they were a doctor.

Similar to Huey P. Newton’s framing of the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, revolutionary movements do not build infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure, rather they build it as a means to building power. Power refers to our ability to change our own or another’s circumstances. As we build power, we may outgrow the structures we once built. That does not mean we stop investing in building structure, period. It means we need to grieve and let go of our attachments to those particular structures, hospice them if need be, and compost those resources into a form that better serves the changing context and our ultimate function - liberation. Our attachment cannot be to structures at the expense of liberation.

4. AVERSION TO BUILDING POWER

People may want to build relationships or community, but they may not be interested in building power. People may want to build structures, but they may not want to build power. People may want to fund regenerative, restorative, yin-building interventions, but may not want that substance to be directed towards building power. Building power requires an explicit and ongoing divestment from the status quo - including the way it permeates our psyche, our relationships, our work, and our organizations. It is often inconvenient and can be uncomfortable.

In a blogpost titled, Money to Strategise, Party, Imagine, Rest, Breathe, Ivan March explicitly locates the role of Guerrilla Foundation’s redistribits - small redistributions of €5,000 to support activist organizations around the world in gathering their people - in the longer work of revolution.

The Foundation asked their community “What event would you organise to celebrate, connect, strategise, or simply deepen relationships in your activist ecosystem?” and funded 26 of the answers they received.

In framing these redistributions, March draws the connections between investing in building relationships and building power for revolution:

“Here’s a truth that doesn’t make it into many grant reports: revolutions run on relationality. It’s not all manifestos, canvassing, press releases, and perfectly reasoned out theories of change, but the messy, embodied, gloriously inefficient work of people actually being with each other.

…Relationality requires resources. You cannot build trust over Zoom forever. You cannot coalition-build without train tickets. You cannot dream up non-dystopian futures on an empty stomach while your nervous system is shot from three years of crisis-response organising.

The €5,000 we’re moving isn’t transformational money. This is small money for essential things: a community space rental, childcare so parents can attend, translation so Polish and Palestinian organisers can understand each other, food so a strategy session doesn’t happen on empty stomachs, a DJ so after the hard conversations there’s still room to dance.

Because what we’ve learned watching movements for years is that the political is personal, and the personal requires material conditions. Allyship isn’t a statement of solidarity you post online; it’s showing up, repeatedly, which requires time, which requires covering your basics. Comradeship isn’t an abstraction; it’s staying in the room when the conversation gets hard, which requires nervous systems regulated enough to not flee, which requires rest, which requires resources. Solidarity isn’t a hashtag; it’s the slow work of learning each other’s struggles deeply enough to show up for them, which requires gatherings, which requires funding.”

Investing in building yin, building structure, and building relationships does not inevitably lead to building power towards liberation. If liberation is the goal, it is important to be explicit, intentional, and consistent in directing and redirecting our building towards that end. Otherwise, these seemingly regenerative and life-affirming efforts can end up being co-opted by counterrevolutionary forces and reinforcing the status quo we are trying to dismantle.

5. PREMATURELY ABANDONING THE STRUCTURE

As Thuyavan shared in his account of the LTTE’s medical service, some medical students left mid-training to pick up arms and return to the frontlines. I read somewhere earlier this week that, “Consistency looks like nothing is happening - until everything changes.” Building capacity requires learning, and learning requires being bad at something until, through sustained effort, we become better. Babies spend weeks and months, rep after rep, trying to prop themselves up - planking, rolling over, falling, moonwalking on their knees, and furrowing their brows, until one day, on one unpredictable rep, they are able to crawl, stand up, walk, or run.

One approach to developing consistency is to tell ourselves to suck it up and accept, however begrudgingly, the reality of delayed gratification. Another is to cultivate the ability to see and appreciate the value of the practice itself, outside of the outcome to which we hope it will lead. Sendolo Diaminah defines practice as something we “do repeatedly because it’s life-giving.” Revisiting Rhythms of Health’s initial framing of work as expending energy towards life, and the importance of being able to see what we are building with our energy, how might we cultivate relationships, structures, and organizations where the daily work of building toward liberation feels as life-giving as we imagine liberation will be?

At the end of the day, this piece is not meant to be a case for funding yin over yang, or people over projects. The (re)building of yin creates the substance that can contain and direct the motion of yang. Projects and programs are not separate from the people that imagine and implement them. A binary constructs a relationship between its poles that is rooted in segregation vs. integration. The binary - of yin vs. yang, people vs. projects - is carceral because it policies possibility and punishes integration.

Building power - the ability to change one’s own or another’s circumstances - requires both structure to contain, direct, and regulate that power, as well as force and momentum to keep it moving. Neither power that is unregulated (yin deficiency) nor power that is stagnant (yang deficiency) is sustainable.

Perhaps that is where this unravelling has led me - not to funding people or funding projects, but to funding the building of power towards liberation, towards life.

To ask, with every decision to redistribute resources: Is this actually strengthening our ability to change our own or another’s circumstances, towards liberation, towards life?

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

I’ve been writing to my kid.

Plot twist: I don’t have a kid.

Context: I love kids. Mothering as a verb is not new to me. Being an aunty / chithi / masi / khala is one of my favorite blessings. A younger version of me had no problem imagining having my own. Somewhere between then and now, a deep fear of having and raising my own children settled in my being. In this moment, spiritually, I am open to that which wants to come through me. Physically and emotionally, my body and heart already FEEL like they’re already carrying something that is becoming. And mentally, no part of it makes any sense and I can’t reconcile it logically, materially, and/or gestures-broadly-at-the-world-ally.

So anyway, I’ve been writing to my kid.

They initiated the conversation.

They dropped in one day earlier this year and made it clear that I needed to start a journal where I was in conversation with them.

I resisted. They ignored my resistance and flooded me with things I needed to capture in this journal. “It’s cute that you think this is optional, but anyway, you gotta write about x, y, z.” Intrusive as they were, I was both intrigued and overwhelmed by their clarity.

Of course MY kid would come out of left field - with an intensity that is both on-brand yet somehow also unexpected - and assign me a project upon first meeting (mars in scorpio, venus in virgo, if that means anything to ya).

The desire to honor what felt akin to a creative impulse meant I gave in and started the journal.

You see, my relationship to writing - my most consistent expression of creativity - is one of faith. Faith, for me, is “the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.” (adrienne maree brown) I have so much trust in the practice of writing that I will follow the impulse, water the seed, and give it as much time, space and energy as it needs to become what it wants to become.

That said, the hesitation around the form factor of ‘child,’ after many years of resisting it, meant that the first words I penned in the journal were “dear wombship.” Opening a conversation with that which wants to come through me, without becoming attached to its form factor. (Not long after that first drop-in, my kid revealed their name, and I’ve been referring to them by it ever since.)

You see, my relationship to having and raising children has been one of fear. Fear of being consumed, fear of becoming someone I don’t recognize and/or respect in the name of parenting, fear of abandoning the children of the world to focus on the one(s) that came out of me, fear of bringing someone into a world that isn’t ready to hold/receive them, fear of needing to live longer than I would otherwise choose, fear of a job whose contract never ends, fear of buying into a lifestyle that is much more comfortable than I have ever needed in order to feel like I’m giving my kid what they need to thrive. The list goes on.

Amidst this barricade of fears, my kid found a loophole in order to make themselves known. They came to me in the form of a creative impulse. Fear wrapped up in faith.

What started off feeling like my system was being hijacked by a stranger, has since become the practice that is sustaining me through one of the most exhausting seasons that I’ve experienced to date.

Writing to my kid has helped me see that fear and faith are both “the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.”

• Faith is the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see that serve our highest good.

• Fear is the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see that may cause danger, pain, and/or harm.

“Practice is your center. What do you do repeatedly because it’s life-giving? And what can you offer from that place?”

Sendolo Diaminah

// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I trust them. I’ve always said that my favorite people to hang with are babies and elders, because they’re the closest to source. The former just came from source and the latter is on their way back to source. I trust them because they move with an honesty that comes in part from having the fewest fucks to give. The babies have yet to be conditioned by the systems that be, and the elders have often lived enough life to see through them.

// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I’m not yet angry with them, and they’re not yet angry with me. Our conversations are shaped by the grace, gentleness, and generosity we hold towards our babies, towards beings not yet born.

Meanwhile, much of the writing with movement spaces is an exercise in condemning and/or critiquing our opponent or our own. Rage protects that which we love, and it can be energizing and empowering to defend what matters to us. And, it takes a lot of energy to be constantly defending, anticipating attack or opposition, and justifying one’s stance.

My kid, on the other hand, just wants to know two things: the truth / an explanation of what is, and why it is that way. When I am in conversation with them, I’m not writing to defend. I’m writing to teach and be taught, to understand and be understood, to receive and be received. Their questions don’t feel like threats or annoyances, but like a genuine expression of their desire to understand. Writing to them means I’m questioning the fundamentals, without feeling the fear of the ground falling out from under me and being vulnerable to attack when it does. Writing to them is a practice that has humility built into it. They don’t need me to know everything, they need me to be invested in figuring it out with them.

“...a child reminds you of all those things that a world that is just based on production does not value. An imagination. What you can’t see. What seems like aimless time, just wandering around. When I’m trying to get somewhere with my daughter, I have to realize that she has no concept of time. It’s just what interests her, what moves her, what excites her, what frustrates her, what feels tragic in the moment. There’s no “I gotta get here by 9 o’clock.” It doesn’t matter....You realize that there’s another dimension, that there’s another way to be in our lives when you know a child. You can be much more motivated by interest, by awe, by wonder.”

Prentis Hemphill

// Writing to my kid is life-giving because they are the most dignified person I’ve gotten to know. Their sense of worth or value isn’t contingent upon me being ready to receive them. They are not threatened by my fear of them and/or what they represent. They are worthy, because they are. They are of value, because they are. They are teaching me who they are, what they need from me, and what they need from the people and world around me, in order to come earth-side. One of the first asks they made of me was around fear:

Mama,

Don’t motivate me using fear, tell me the truth. Even if it means telling me that you’re scared, you don’t know, you’re tired, or you’re sad. If you have to move past your own fear to access the truth, then do that work, and then tell me the truth. I am borne of love and truth coming together - I have the capacity to hold truth delivered with love and love delivered with truth. I don’t need you to be infallible for me, I need you to be honest with me. Power as we are seeing it in this moment is usually unprocessed fear in action. Process your fear so that the power you wield as it relates to me is love - not fear - in action.

[Kid’s name]

// Writing to my kid is life-giving because they are forcing me to confront not only my stories of fear, but the way those stories have become stored in my cells, bones, and blood.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), emotions are energy in motion and the natural movement of fear is downward, conserving, and deeply rooted. Fear is meant to activate caution, and then settle. Fear is not meant to always resolve. We are meant to experience and store some levels of fear as a means of protecting ourselves from very real threats. Fear is stored in the kidneys, which also houses our Jing. Our Jing is our essence. It can be understood as our constitutional blueprint — the intelligence we are born with that governs fertility, growth, aging, regeneration, and reproductive capacity. Jing is closely related to marrow, DNA, ancestry, and the deepest reserves of the body. Jing provides the foundation from which all other substances (i.e. blood, tissue, fluids) arise. I repeat, Jing and fear are housed in the same place within our bodies.

In a pathological condition, this unprocessed fear can show up physically as lower back pain, premature aging, exhaustion, and adrenal burnout, and emotionally as anxiety, panic, and insomnia.

Fear, in a pathological condition, strongly depletes our Jing and consumes our essence - i.e. who we are at our core. What we are most afraid of wraps itself around what makes us who we are. This makes it harder for us to access our essence, because our fear becomes wrapped up with our essence, and accessing that fear feels like the scariest thing in the world. Our body wants to protect us from moving that fear, and we would sooner cut ourselves off from accessing our essence than touch that fear.

Emotions are meant to move through our bodies vs. become a part of them, and all emotional storages come from a momentary need for survival. That said, fear runs much deeper than other emotions and is only stored in situations of (real or perceived) life and death.

As a woman, unprocessed grief has been socially much easier for me to access than unprocessed rage. As a human, however, both grief and rage have been physiologically easier to access than unprocessed fear. And that fear is what my kid is asking me to tap into and move. The process of bringing life into this world requires Jing, it requires our constitutional blueprint, and if mine is wrapped up in fear, my kid is asking me to not pass it down.

“You will be turned inside out…You will think, believe you cannot go on. You will realize that if you ever thought that facing yourself, the bloody, ugly, sublime truth of yourself was the ultimate responsibility, you were wrong. It is to face yourself and realize you cannot run away because another life, your child’s, depends on this ultimate self-encounter.

Welcome to mamahood.

I am trying to articulate the blood and muscle, the tears, the shaking, how it is no longer really a choice, of whether or not you will have the courage to not run away from your own fear, panic, lack of self-control. It is something beyond and before courage. It is a visceral sense that vulnerable, quivering life is breaking you and you have to let it.

Mai’a Williams, Revolutionary Mothering

A few years ago, I experienced one of my worst fears coming true. It destroyed me in ways that felt unrecoverable in the moment, and it felt like being burned alive in my core. Constitutionally on fire. What emerged on the other side, however, was someone that those closest to me described both as “a whole new person” and “so much more yourself.” Internally, I felt so much lighter, younger, and more energized than I had felt while (subconsciously) holding that fear. My creativity went through the roof - I wrote a book, designed an exhibit, did a performance, took up tango, took voice lessons, became a celebrant, etc. If our Jing governs fertility, aging, growth, regeneration, and reproductive capacity, and our Jing and fear are both stored in the kidneys, then it makes sense that releasing and moving that fear felt initially like dying and then like returning to my natural state - the original pre-fear blueprint.

I’ve named fears in the past, but I’m realizing just how unfamiliar I am to actually FEELING fear. In TCM, the way to access and start to pull back on stored fear is through stillness, immense safety, and rebuilding the matter (i.e. blood, fluids, tissue) that our bodies need to sustain life. We are not trying to release anything, rather we are creating the conditions where the body no longer needs to hold that fear in storage. We cannot move fear from a place of depletion or unsafety. The movements that are recommended for signaling this safety are bone breathing and still, grounding postures. Feeling down to the marrow of our bones, and breathing into our very depths.

For me, the somatics of fear have felt so different from the somatics of grief or rage. I can usually feel the wave of grief swelling within me before it crashes, just as I can feel the fire of rage bubbling before it rises. There is usually a runway, and neither of these emotions moves through me particularly quickly. Meanwhile, fear feels so much more sudden. It’s a sudden burst of gasping tears - often provoked by a trigger I can’t see coming - followed by a shudder, and then it’s gone. As the body then reorganizes itself to fill the space that once held the fear, grief takes over, allowing the body to feel and move through what it cost the body to hold that fear for as long as it did.

This last season in particular has felt both deeply regulating and incredibly exhausting. More often than not, my nervous system feels settled, and I’m bone-tired. It has been a season of responding to “how are you?” with “exhausted” and “why, what’s going on?” with “literally nothing, nothing is going on, existing is exhausting.” I’m realizing now that this is the contradiction that exists at the precipice of moving stored fear. There is enough safety internally and externally for the fear to be moved out of storage and through and out of my body, yet the closer I get to accessing that fear, the more my body feels like it’s under existential threat, and the harder it has to work to stop me from accessing it. Ironically, as safety increases, so do fear’s defenses, alongside the exhaustion of keeping them up. This positive feedback loop breaks, and the fear is able to be moved, when the safety exhausts the defenses. The practice of writing to my kid has helped generate the conditions where safety is exhausting the defenses, more and more, slowly but surely. It’s terrifying and grounding all at once. And a lot of it is invisible work - something we cannot yet see.

// Writing to my kid is life-giving because I’ve come to realize that they’re not just my kid. My response to “What’s Temwa’s love story?” has always been “Temwa’s love story is the people’s love story,” even before I was able to articulate it in those words. Likewise, my kid is teaching me that they are the people’s kid, that they have to be. That they may come through me, but they will be nurtured, shaped, and held by many, just as they will nurture, shape, and hold many outside of me. As Kristen Martin writes in her article, For the Children: Can family abolitionists and activists against family policing work together?:

“For Lewis, family “is the name we use for the fact that care is privatized in our society,” a situation that creates “property rights” for parents over children “but also quasi-exclusive accountability for a child’s life - a situation that she argues is bad for children and parents both. Her vision is for “a world in which all people are cared for by many by default,” a post-family world in which it is not biology or law but comradeship that binds us. Lane-McKinley similarly bemoans that “so long as there is private property, childhood must be defined and limited by it, and we are left to speculate on what else childhood could be.”

As grandiose and utopic as this idea may sound (and has definitely sounded to me) in the era of the nuclear family, my kid needs me to see it as an inevitability. My job is not to question the premise, but to ask myself, “Who do I need to become, and what do I need to learn and unlearn, in order for them to become and be the people’s kid?”

// Writing to my kid is life-giving, because in writing to them, I’m writing to all kids, and to the kids within each of us. Just as my kid is the people’s kid, the people’s kids are also mine.

I’ve struggled to reconcile the speed at which James Baldwin’s “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe” quote is invoked in crises that impact children (i.e. all of them), with our collective inertia when it comes to actually acting like it. If all the kids are our kids, and this is what we allow to happen to them, are any of us truly fit to be parents, of our own or anyone else’s kids? The systems that be have in turn taken this insecurity (i.e. am I a good parent?) that they themselves had a hand in manufacturing, and channeled it into individual quests for perfectionism (i.e. there is a ‘best’ way to be a parent, and this is how you do it). This in turn makes it harder to see the nuclear family for the tool of counterinsurgency that it is. We are so busy and exhausted with trying to raise and shape lives that are meant to be raised and shaped by many hands, and trying to get it perfect at that, that we often have no spoons left for seeing, much less dismantling, these systems that both “dehumanize children and normalize hatred towards them because they are people with high care needs” (Rania El-Mugammar) and commodify that care for profit.

In truth, parenting is not a code to crack, as is often sold to us, but a practice of becoming alongside something or someone that came through us. We are supposed to come undone, but in a way that brings us closer to life, not death.

Amidst fears that having a kid will isolate me from parts of myself, what I care about, and the world, writing to my kid has actually facilitated the opposite. They’ve not taken me away from any of these things, rather they’ve become a key stakeholder in these conversations. I cannot claim to trust them, to value their perspective, if I’m not active in the practice of asking them, listening to them and letting them meaningfully shape their own, my, and our collective becoming.

Writing to my kid is a reminder of what James Baldwin shares in The Devil Finds Work,

“There is a ‘sanctity’ involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the ‘vital interest’ of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.”

In a tribute to Baldwin, author Prentis Hemphill shares,

“I think every so-called solution that we might arrive at seems like it will emerge from what Baldwin said - from that kind of love of the child, of the future. The kind of love that has us center them, has us restructure everything around them. That kind of love that says that they are an answer to a question that we’re asking. That they deserve our attention. That they deserve our care. And that anyone, and any entity that would treat a child this way, that would meet the beauty of a child’s life with violence or abuse, must be stopped, by us.”

^I read every “our” in this quote as the collective, not just a child’s biological or adopted parents.

// Fear, Faith & The Future

Both fear and faith are in relationship with the future. To me, the future is that which is becoming. We can orient to that which is becoming through the lens of fear and/or faith.

Prentis Hemphill equates the practice of nurturing a child to that of nurturing a future. They describe the practice of nurturing a child’s becoming as an act of faith.

“...Being able to see outside of our individual selves. Our individual lives. Because what a child compels you to do, is create. What a child compels you to do is nurture. To plant a seed. To think about what will grow beyond your life. There’s a generosity in that kind of relationship. That kind of intergenerational relationship is all strung together by generosity. By thinking about planting something, thinking about involving yourself in a future through nurturing, through love. I don’t know what will come, I don’t see what will come, but if I love you, if I hold you, if I look into your eyes, if I feed you, if I protect you, there is possibility.”

…But if we don’t have an orientation to children, I think we’ve lost an orientation to the future. We’ve gotten so navel-gazing, so solipsistic, so focused on ourselves and our greed and our domination, and ultimately our small, little lives that we’ve forgotten that core of generosity. We’ve forgotten that core of faith. It’s not even hope, you have faith...you pour into a child because you have faith.”

Technically, I have a graduate degree in strategic foresight. In reality, I have a deep aversion to the title of “futurist,” I can’t remember the last time I used any of the foresight tools or frameworks I learned in school for anything meaningful, and every time I hear someone say they do “futures work,” a part of me wants to respond with “yea, and I breathe.” It ultimately feels like we made a simple, universal thing “complex,” scarce, and elitist so that we could develop an industry around navigating the “complexity,” accessing the rarity, and striving for credibility. As we do in late-stage capitalism.

(^complex is in quotes because I’m referring to a specific kind of complexity that is deliberately engineered to be talked about, convened over, and unpacked indefinitely, but never materially acted upon.)

Yes, we as beings are complex.

Yes, the systems we inhabit are intricate.

Yes, our futures are shaped by a trillion different interactions happening in a million different places.

And our ability to engage with all of the above is in-built.

It needs to be re-membered, right-sized, and practiced, not bought, sold, performed, and/or justified.

Earlier this week, I came across an essay by Jasmine Bina that reminded me of what drew me to foresight as a practice in the first place. She writes:

“If you want to know what world lies ahead, do not look outward into technologies, headlines and passing trends. Look inward to where we are feeling something we cannot yet name.

All of us who are in the business of deciphering the future do the same thing. We make ourselves sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and we give it language.

But that’s a really hard thing to do. Anyone who does this knows what it takes to give an invisible energy words. It feels like a small knowing that turns into a pull. That pull turns into its own gravity, and as it gets stronger it reorganizes your entire mental map around it. And as all of this pressure builds up inside your body, you struggle to name what the black hole at the center of it all is. It’s as far as a universe you’ve never been to, and as close as a word on the tip of your tongue.”

The practice of writing to my kid has felt like all of the above.

» Looking inward to where I am feeling something I cannot yet name.

» Making myself sensitive enough to feel the invisible energy in the air, and giving it language.

» Reorganizing my entire mental map around it.

» Making sense of something that is indeed as far as a universe I’ve never been to, and as close as a word on the tip of my tongue.

Bina also speaks to the courage (i.e. persistence despite fear) that this work requires of us:

“It’s misguided to think the future is somewhere ahead of us. It’s already inside us, distributed across millions of people who are feeling the same unnamed thing at the same time. Strategy, leadership, futurism are all, at their highest form, the same skill. They are the willingness to listen to that field, and have the nerve to translate it before it becomes obvious.

That’s why this work takes guts.

It requires that you take in all kinds of inputs you don’t always understand, to feel your way through them just as much as you think your way through them, and most crucially, to constantly be reorganizing your ideas around things that at best feel vague. And then of course, you have to have the guts to name it out loud.”

This practice of reorganizing our lives around things that at best feel vague, around inputs that we don’t always understand, as Bina describes, reminds me of Christelle Ambr’s description of quantum leaping.

“Quantum field - the underlying field of potential where all potential states of reality exist before they are observed or experienced.

Quantum leap - a sudden shift from one state to another without moving through every incremental step in between.

Now the part people distort:

This isn’t magic. It’s identity and behavior catching up fast.

You don’t become “Version B” by waiting to feel like her. You become her by acting from her standards while still feeling like Version A.

That tension is the work.

Version A:

• Makes decisions based on current evidence

• Waits for certainty

• Reinforces the same identity

Version B

• Decides based on where she’s going, not where she is

• Moves before it feels natural

• Holds standards that her current reality doesn’t yet justify

So the “quantum leap” is not instant transformation. It’s identity override.

You are still Version A internally, but:

• You choose differently.

• You tolerate discomfort.

• You stop negotiating with old patterns.

Do that consistently, and reality reorganizes to match. Not because you “manifested” out of nowhere, but because you stopped feeding the timeline you say you want to leave.”

(^While Ambr’s description of quantum leaping speaks more to individual identity and behavior, I also see its relevance in shifting collective identity and behavior, in the practice of hospicing World A and bringing forth World B (or C, D, etc.) through acting by its standards and living as though it is already here.)

I think the work of bringing life - in all its forms - into this world happens through the practice of quantum leaping. I think mothering - in all its forms - is a practice of quantum leaping.

Writing to my kid, too, has asked me to engage in the practice of quantum leaping.

• To move before / without certainty, but after / with knowing (i.e. the feeling of something we cannot yet name).

• To tolerate the discomfort of moving before it feels natural.

• To move in ways that “aren’t like me,” but feel aligned with who I need / want to become for the life that is ready to come through me - whether that’s a kid, a project, an event, or an idea.

In a world where our ability to value something is attached to our ability to measure it, what does success look like in this work of following the invisible energy that becomes a pull, this work of acting from Version B’s standards while we are still Version A internally? Bina describes her metric, which also happens to be one of mine, in this work:

“…there’s one simple heuristic that always tells me when I’ve gotten it right.

The only feedback that matters is when people say to me, “You just named something I didn’t know I was feeling.”...That’s when I know I’m tapping into the future.

People have an instinct for what’s coming because we are creating it from the inside out. But they have a really hard time accessing it. When you help them do that, it feels like a tremendous relief. And they will thank you for it.”

Whether it be through my work with Dismantling the Master’s Tools or in conversations with friends and strangers alike, this is a piece of feedback that I receive often - one whose frequency never impacts its novelty.

The practice of writing to my kid, however, offers this gift back to me.

It helps me name things I didn’t know I was feeling.

It offers me tremendous relief.

And I am immensely grateful to them for it.

Fear and faith are both the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see.

The former foregrounds realities that may cause us danger, pain, or harm. And the latter foregrounds realities that serve our highest good.

Neither fear nor faith stop the becoming, neither fear nor faith stop the future from unfolding, but both have the potential to shape it.

Earlier this month, I texted a friend while teetering somewhere in-between fear and faith:

“I feel like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and taking one last look back to make sure - anything else I need to know?” I asked.

They replied, “I think the only thing is to pray on it first and then do it, with the full and complete faith that whatever happens next is in your best interest. And don’t do it before you have that complete faith.”

As I asked myself how I’d know when I had complete faith, I thought of my kid immediately. I have complete faith in them, in their becoming, whatever form that may take.

The practice of writing to my kid is drawing me closer and closer to complete faith, to the ability to believe in realities we can’t yet see - realities that serve my and our highest good.

It reminds me that what’s for us will never pass us by.

That what’s for us will be on time, but never on demand.

p.s. This piece, titled Maktūb مَكْتُوب: What Is Yours Will Always Find You, is one I’ve come back to often over the course of writing this essay, as a source of strength, clarity, and admittedly also in an attempt to integrate it somehow. But, some works are more companions than components, and are best positioned standing next to us in their fullness vs. integrated within us in pieces. This essay, I’ve come to realize, is the latter.

p.p.s. To mothers / parents of 3D children: I know that writing to a kid is not the same as having and raising one in the flesh. My intention here is not to conflate these labors, or to romanticize the latter. For me, love is a practice - something we do over and over because it’s (ultimately) life-giving. And for me, the practice of writing to my kid feels like tending the 3D soil of my body, and disarming the 4D pest control of my mind, so that the life that has made itself known to me in the 5D has what it needs to sprout and become in the 3D, should it choose to. (If I’ve lost you, I was supposed to. Maktūb.)

Related Essays

• Quote Convo: On the difference between hope and faith

• Quote Convo: On Perfectionism x Freedom

• Reflecting on 4 Years of Dismantling & Naming Mothering as a Mandate

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  The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

I’ve written before about the pitfalls of jamming a moral peg into an economic hole (i.e. appealing to morality within systems motivated by profit). Today, I have another bone to pick with morality.

Morality is defined as the principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.

This season, morality has resurfaced as a theme within interpersonal conflicts around me. Specifically, the tension between choosing to not engage in conflict and/or being boundaried about engaging in conflict, and wondering whether that is indeed the principled choice. It is the tension that emerges when discerning whether refusal is coming from a place of agency or a place of avoidance.

All of these questions are rooted in morality, and I don’t think it is effective, healthy, or sustainable to engage in conflict solely because it is the “right” or “good” thing to do.

Instead, I think our decisions around whether and to what extent we engage in conflict should be mediated first and foremost by integrity.

Integrity, at its root, means “intact, whole, complete.” Do I believe that engaging in this conflict - with this person, in this moment - will help me become more whole?

To be whole, in the words of author Quill Christie-Peters, is:

• to be present enough in our bodies to viscerally feel all that they contain

• to experience fleeting or permanent presence in our bodies, despite the pain, in order to live out our responsibilities that echo from the great beyond as calls for justice and liberation.

Here’s why I believe integrity (the practice of wholeness) is a more reliable compass than morality (the pursuit of goodness).

1. The pursuit of goodness is contingent on external validation, whereas our sense of wholeness can only be truly discerned internally.

Sometimes, in the pursuit of goodness, we act in ways that are at odds with our body’s instincts. We may play into the perfect victim narrative to garner more sympathy, even as it compromises our dignity and that of our peoples to do so. We may say yes to engaging in restorative/transformative justice processes to prove that we are “real abolitionists,” when our bodies scream that they are not ready yet to revisit the harm. This betrayal is made possible because the pursuit of goodness outsources our moral compass, and accountability is mediated by an external source outside of our bodies.

The practice of wholeness or integrity, however, brings accountability back to the self, and back to the body. It asks, what can we live with, what decisions can our bodies tolerate, regardless of who’s looking or not looking? Who are we and what do we actually have the capacity to contain when no one’s looking? As I shared with a friend earlier this month,

“At this point, I think it’s less about ethics, and more about what your body can live with. An ethics that betrays your body isn’t gonna help anyone…Repair doesn’t happen on a linear timeline and you can’t repair trust with [someone] without repairing trust with your body, or at the cost of repairing trust with your body.”

That said, it’s important to acknowledge that we are ultimately social creatures whose survival is interdependent on each other. Part of why we seek external validation is because it signals to us a sense of safety and belonging. In this sense, reciprocal recognition is not just important, it also very human. However, reciprocal recognition without self-recognition is not sustainable.

A self that doesn’t recognize itself cannot hold up against threat for very long. Colonial systems understand this, and even within contexts where oppressed peoples have divested from colonial recognition - from “goodness” as defined by colonial states - these systems seek to break reciprocal- and self-recognition. This is why colonial occupations far and wide seek to inflict injuries - on bodies, psyches, and spirits - that make it harder for us to recognize ourselves.

As Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah describes of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza:

In his essay, Like a Bag Trying to Empty, author Kaleem Hawa highlights the psychic injury inflicted upon Palestinian political prisoners - including Walid Daqqa - by the Israeli occupation in an attempt to severe the self that sees itself as a part of the resistance:

Anishinaabe author Quill Christie-Peters speaks to equivalent injury inflicted upon Indigenous bodies by settler colonial states within a North American context:

Each of these contexts describes an attack on wholeness and the ways in which oppressed peoples continue to resist these attacks through self- and reciprocal recognition. It’s worth noting that these are attacks on integrity, not morality. This is because our oppressors understand that while our wholeness may take longer to restore (I believe we are all born whole) than our goodness, it is also harder to manipulate, and therefore much more of a threat to systems contingent on submission.

In this sense, divesting from goodness and instead being guided by the practice becoming whole requires us to develop and move from what somatic practitioner Prentis Hemphill describes as a non-contingent self.

Ironically, wholeness, too, has its contradictions.

For one, the practice of wholeness often involves letting ourselves disintegrate in order to become more whole. The discernment that Hemphill speaks of, however, is around what and who we allow to disintegrate us and the container within which we allow that disintegration to happen.

When we pursue goodness at the expense of wholeness, we risk betraying ourselves in order to appeal to an external moral standard. When we pursue wholeness at the expense of goodness, our (more) intact sense of self can help shield us against any external backlash for abandoning goodness.

While goodness is a judgement that is attained, wholeness is a practice that is ongoing and ever-evolving. The goal is not to remain whole by not exposing ourselves to any vulnerability, but rather to become whole - again and again - by allowing ourselves to be undone and remade in ways that are consistent with our values and the worlds we want to call forth.

That said, the language of wholeness and integrity can also be co-opted.

For example, it is ultimately a disservice to use “wholeness” as an excuse to shield one’s self against the necessary growth that can come with engaging in uncomfortable conversations. Growth requires us to come undone in a way that can feel counterintuitive to the mainstream understanding of wholeness.

In a recent conversation with a friend where I was trying to explain that sometimes the refusal to engage with conflict can come from feeling unsafe around the other person, they responded, “Miss me with that safety shit.” Appalled as I was in that moment, I can hold that we live in a world where safety is often conflated with discomfort, and the language of “safety” is strategically weaponized to avoid uncomfortable-but-ultimately-not-unsafe interactions. Whether on the world stage, or within our movements, we have seen how “safety” is conveniently evoked to evade accountability and avoid consequences. This weaponization often goes unchecked, especially in progressive circles, because safety, like wholeness, is subjective and can only truly be discerned internally.

So, as people practicing towards wholeness, it is our responsibility to:

1. regard and honor our body’s cues around safety (i.e. rebuilding trust with the body)

2. do the longer, slower, often painful work of healing our traumatic retentions1 so that we are responding to conflict in current time, accounting for our current skills, power, and capacity (i.e. building our capacity to be with greater discomfort).

These two have to happen in tandem. Honoring our body’s boundaries around safety without engaging in trauma healing work means that we only feel safe insofar as we are not triggered. Meanwhile, engaging in trauma healing work without having rebuilt foundational trust and safety in our bodies can open us up to more activation, harm, and/or self-betrayal in the name of “healing”. Neither done alone is sustainable.

Operating from a frame of wholeness (vs. goodness) allows us the space to refuse to engage in a dynamic feels unsafe in this moment, while bestowing upon us the responsibility to rebuild that safety within ourselves so that when a similar dynamic repeats itself in the future, with the same or different person, we can respond with more agency, deeper self-trust, and a greater embodied capacity to stay with and metabolize fear and/or discomfort.

In other words, wholeness is not an excuse for disengagement, but an impetus to (re)build up one’s embodied ability to engage authentically, sustainably, and with agency.

2. Guilt, governed by morality, cannot adequately resource a conflict process.

The desire to be good is often mediated by the guilt of having done something wrong. Guilt is a moral emotion that occurs when someone realizes that they have violated their own principles and/or universal moral standards. When understood as a collection of basic emotions, guilt is composed of self-directed anger, sadness for the victim, anxiety, and fear (e.g., of damaging or losing relationships with individuals and society).

While guilt may be a helpful emotion in realizing that we did something wrong, I find that it is much less helpful in understanding, metabolizing, and where possible, repairing that wrong. While guilt may bring us to a conflict process, it cannot adequately or sustainably resource the work. This is because:

• When we engage in conflict from a place of guilt, what we’re looking for from the other is absolution.

• When we engage in conflict from a place of fearing the consequences of our actions or anxiety about the relationship, what we’re looking for from the other is comfort.

• When we engage in conflict from a place of sadness and/or pity for the other, what we’re looking for from the other is an affirmation of their victimhood (and abandonment of their agency) so that we may play savior.

• When we engage in conflict from a place of insecurity, what we’re looking for from the other is security.

• When we engage in conflict from a place of unworthiness, what we’re looking from the other is validation of our worth and value.

While all of these feelings are natural responses to having caused hurt or harm, they reflect a contingent self, and are ultimately not useful positions from which to engage in generative conflict. Generative conflict, as defined by The Wildfire Project “generates more possibilities, greater connection, and fuller expression, instead of shutting these things down.” The pursuit of goodness pushes us to do and seek out things that make us feel better, whereas the practice of wholeness pushes us to do and seek out things that build our capacity to feel more. It does this by facilitating honesty, understanding, and accountability.

That said, it’s harder to be honest with someone who hurt / harmed you - particularly when there is a power dynamic involved - when they are looking to you for comfort, security, and/or an affirmation of their worthiness. It’s harder to center your agency when someone is determined to see you solely as a victim. Equally, it’s harder to center their agency when someone is determined to see themselves solely as a victim of the consequences that they themselves had a hand in creating. Lastly, it’s harder to request accountability from someone who hurt / harmed you when what they’re really looking for is absolution.

All of this to say, guilt cannot sustainably resource this work.

Besides, I don’t want you to engage in conflict because you feel bad, I want you to engage because this work is consistent with who you want to be/become and coherent with the future(s) you want to practice towards. Consistency and coherence, not guilt, will sustain this work.

I don’t want you to engage in conflict because you feel bad, I want you to engage because you have capacity to engage. Capacity, not guilt, will sustain this work.

I don’t want you to engage in conflict because you feel bad, I want you to engage because you see it as an opportunity to become more whole. Integrity, not guilt, will sustain this work.

3. Morality is supremacist by design, and wholeness doesn’t have to be.

Within the systems we live in, morality is supremacist by design. There is an absolutism to the way we engage with morality that makes it prone to supremacy.

Poet and author June Jordan highlights some of the more extreme manifestations and consequences of this supremacy in her essay, Hunting for Jews?:

She interrogates this alleged moral superiority (i.e. goodness), in herself and within Americans more broadly, in her essay, Do You Do Well To Be Angry?:

Jordan goes on to clarify:

In other words, America - a microcosm of colonial powers more broadly - is hated because it actively interrupts the ability of fellow nations and their peoples to be whole, all in the name of its own goodness and moral superiority.

Meanwhile, unlike morality, wholeness and supremacy cannot co-exist because supremacy requires division in order to create hierarchy.

In her book, On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation, author Quill Christie-Peters takes it one step further and rejects any hierarchies, binaries, and absolutes that mainstream wellness and healing industries have tried to impose onto wholeness.

These words from Quill return me to my thesis.

Wholeness (integrity), not goodness (morality), is a more reliable compass through conflict because:

• it is embodied internally vs. constructed externally,

• it helps develop and is reinforced by a non-contingent self,

• it facilitates and is strengthened by honesty and accountability, and

• it fundamentally rejects supremacy.

Related essays:

• Jamming a Moral Peg in an Economic Hole in the Time of “Do the Right Thing”

• Love Letters to Conflict: Postcards from the Pursuit of Understanding

• Seeking Recognition Within Capitalist Colonial Systems

• Learning to Feel MORE vs. Feel BETTER in the Time of Mass Atrocities

• Quote Convo: On Safety

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

If you’ve been following my work for some time, you’ll know that I’ve written and spoken plenty about contradictions. Even so, reading this reflection from my friend Hima a few weeks ago left me with much to integrate.

“It’s wild that we are accelerating the capacity of capitalism through unregulated and militarized AI while calling for / hoping / praying for liberation / revolutions. Our capacity to hold so many contradictions without principled resolution kind of scares me. We’ve gotten so good at holding contradictions and doing nothing with them.”

Contradictions are supposed to create discomfort, and discomfort is supposed to move us towards a change that shifts us closer to alignment. Instead, we are developing increased comfort with discomfort, and I’m starting to wonder whether we’re using frameworks like holding multiple truths and “both/and” to pacify vs. activate ourselves and each other.

I fear that we are now acknowledging contradictions and multiple truths like we do land acknowledgements. As if it’s a box to check, rather than a relationship to interrogate, or a responsibility to uphold. We have become so practiced at these acknowledgements that we think it’s where the work ends versus begins. Even worse, we want to be recognized for diagnosing and naming phenomena whose consequences people have been LIVING and warning against for years. In a world that normalizes inaction, articulating the problems and naming the tensions is the celebrated ceiling.

In reality, we are not expanded simply by holding multiple truths. We are expanded in integrating those truths within the context of our bodies, our lives, our work, and our relationships. The root of the word ‘integrate’ means “to make [something] whole, bring together the parts of.”

It’s the work of trying to integrate polarities - the work of integrating opposing truths into a life and into action - that pushes us towards change. Meanwhile, we’ve developed increasing comfort with holding contradicting truths and bypassing the work of integration.

Things don’t make sense because we are bypassing the labor of sense-making and/or delegating it entirely to AI. And we are not satisfied with its responses because its process is mechanical and devoid of embodiment and struggle. Besides, if AI is simply regurgitating back to us a synthesis of what we’ve already fed it and/or what we’ve already archived into the internet, and we (i.e. its source) are resisting integration, what it mirrors back to us will also be devoid of meaningful integration.

True integration and/or meaningful synthesis is not something we consume. It’s a process that takes something apart to its bare bones, asks us to examine and interrogate our relationship to each component piece, and then gathers the pieces - and us - back together in a way that leaves us feeling more whole, more healed, and more able to respond to the present moment while accounting for our current skills, power, and competencies. True integration is an operating system upgrade.

Consuming someone else’s synthesis is also not integration. Their process may serve as a guide or a companion, but integration will not happen in our bodies until we let ourselves be moved by what we consume.

The systems we live in optimize for consumption, not integration or synthesis. Dominant systems frame consumption as movement and synthesis as static, consumption as productive and synthesis as a less valuable use of time. Consumption may move us, but it’s synthesis and integration that clarify and transform us in a lasting way. A lack of integration overwhelms us and we are taught to manage that overwhelm through 1) more consumption and/or 2) disconnecting entirely from this reality. Both strategies impede integration.

In truth, we can’t hold a contradiction forever. At some point, something has to give. In a previous love letter, I had likened the process of metabolizing a contradiction to the process of giving birth:

“Our bodies are capable of holding contradictions. Our bodies are capable of holding the ‘both/and’, as well as the ‘beyond’ that can emerge when oppositional truths are braided together. Our bodies are capable of widening, contracting, and eventually bursting through boundaries in the labor of bringing forth new life and new worlds. In fact, it is the most natural thing they do, and it is why we are here.”

As with the process of birthing, our bodies are capable of holding tension, but not indefinitely. It becomes increasingly dangerous for mother (i.e. the body that is holding this tension) and/or the child (i.e. the potential that is trying to make itself known and/or enter the world through this tension). You either have to deliver the baby or the tension that is intended to support the delivery will turn itself upon the mother, child, or both. In the words of somatics practitioner Prentis Hemphill,

“When awareness/activation and action do not match, our body will FEEL the difference.”

Ultimately, failing to metabolize these tensions and integrate these co-existing truths makes us sick. So many of us are coming down with chronic illnesses, many of them autoimmune (i.e. our bodies turning on and attacking themselves) that our ancestors never experienced. And it’s not just because we are living longer, it’s because we are pushed to compartmentalize more and more each day in order to exist and survive within these systems.

Even so, even through illness - chronic or acute - our bodies have the blueprint for resistance. The fatigue that so many of us feel in our bodies, the fatigue that we are taught to despise and resent, is a part of that resistance. As Alice Sparkly Kat explains:

“...your fatigue is not your personal opponent but an ancient protector of your vitality.

…Your fatigue impedes your ability to tolerate what you should not and teaches you who you trust enough to rest with.

…People have made the biggest changes possible not when we are selectively outraged now and then but when we get too tired of the status quo to continue the work of maintaining it.

Before you are fully tired, before you get to fatigue, you still have enough energy and anger and desire to try and argue back within the system that has captured you.

Fatigue gives you a clarity that urgency cannot.”

Fatigue, as Kat describes it, forces integration between awareness and action. In turn, integration builds self-trust. We trust ourselves more when we are whole, versus when we feel fractured or at odds with ourselves. And self-trust reconnects us to our agency.

We see this process - despair preventing integration, fatigue forcing it, and agency following the clarity borne of it - reflected in writer Hanif Abdurraqib’s description of what June Jordan’s love poems do for him:

“I knew I needed to immediately and desperately throw myself back into the June Jordan Love Poem when I recently, in a long stretch of overwhelming despair, had somehow convinced myself that in the midst of another new apocalypse, desire was unnecessary, even selfish. What I was actually telling myself was that I didn’t (yet) know how to tune the instrument of my heart within this specific symphony of chaos, and I had momentarily grown too afraid of what failure might reveal. But within the backdrop of an ending world, several new worlds are invented. We get to decide what type of apocalypse we might want to have, and we can’t surrender all of the ruins to the nefarious designs and limited imaginations of the powerful.”

In Abdurraqib’s case, the act of “tuning the instrument of [his] heart within this specific symphony of chaos” is integration by another name.

So, do we still value sense-making?

Sharpening contradictions as a strategy only works if we value consistency and are invested in things making sense. Instead, I see us developing increased comfort with things not making sense. Our bar for sense-making has dropped as low as the integrative capacity of the current president of the United States and his Zionist puppet masters. This is so much so that when a relatively put together Canadian Prime Minister Marc Carney riddled off a calm, cool, and collected speech full of contradictions at 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, we the people of the World Wide Web fell over ourselves to praise it as “pragmatic,” “eloquent,” “refreshing,” and “an example of grounded leadership.”

As writer and comedian Nour Hadidi writes in her recent satirical piece:

“Carney told us that Canada does not sell weapons to Israel. And we don’t. We sell them to the US, who sells them to Israel. Get your facts straight! When the NDP introduced Bill C-233, the No More Loopholes Act, which would have closed this loophole and required human-rights assessments for arms shipped via the United States, Carney voted against it. This is being held against him, which is unfair. He has articulated his position fully on the matter, calling for a “Zionist Palestinian state,” which is a term that doesn’t make sense. But the confidence with which he stated it suggests he knows what it means, and that should be enough.

…Mark Carney is not Donald Trump. This is true and important. Trump will tell you exactly which thought came into his head five seconds ago. He’ll tell you what he’s going to do and then do it. Carney will tell you what he believes, beautifully, and then do something else. This is called leadership.

He said Canada will never join the Iran war, and before that said it might, and before that said he couldn’t rule it out. And the through-line in all these positions is that he is thinking carefully and wearing a really good suit while doing so. He is not a perfect man. He is a Canadian man. He is trying, and regretting, and clarifying, and that has always counted for something in this country. It is, in fact, the whole brand.”

As Hadidi describes, we have traded the embodiment of coherence for the performance of eloquence. I think we’ve abandoned the standard for coherence for these so-called leaders in part because we’ve lost touch with what it - coherence, integration, wholeness - feels like in our own bodies. How can we demand something from others that we have forgotten in ourselves?

This brings me back to where we began:

• Are we both/and-ing our way out of taking material action and shaping tangible change?

• Are our practices of “both/and” and holding contradictions actually helping us build power, where “power” is our ability to change our own or another’s conditions?

• Are vent diagrams helping us sit with contradictions in ways that pacify us, or are they allowing us to visualize the tension in a way that heightens it, in a way that makes it less tolerable, in a way that facilitates metabolization and demands a shift?

• Is the practice of holding multiple truths helping us evade a decision, or is it sharpening our understanding of the consequences of the choice(s) we are being asked to make?

June Jordan’s poetry, for example, has a way of doing the latter. As Hanif Abdurraqib describes,

“The subgenre I most connect to is the June Jordan Love Poem, which is a form most commonly propelled by “and.” In Intifada Incantation, when she writes “I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP,” those are interconnected ideas, it isn’t creating some mythology of loving someone well despite crisis or (worse) demanding that love itself is such a miracle that it, alone, will consume the world’s evils. The June Jordan Love Poem insists, instead, that one must be as inventive with their commitments to loving others as they are with their commitments to immediately and urgently dismantling every brutality, every cruelty that places any limitations on our hearts. I love you and I want a different, and better world. And I am fighting for that better world, because on the other side of it, beyond at least some of those callous obstacles, imagine how much better we might be able to love each other.”

In other words, Jordan’s “and” is neither surrender nor excuse. It is a boundary, a red line, that says no you will not separate these two things and make me choose between them. Jordan’s “and” is a symbol of the struggle she wages on the page, within her body, and through her actions to integrate these ideas that empire works to severe and keep severed. To love is to will another’s existence, and so I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP is entirely coherent, entirely embodied.

In her 1984 essay Nicaragua: Why I Had To Go There, Jordan writes, “Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.” I believe Jordan does this by generating an intolerable tension on the page, one that both reflects and intensifies the tension in her body. “How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?” she asks in the same essay. If power = voltage x current, Jordan invents her power by turning up the charge on her words and deliberately maneuvering the flow of the current as she speaks them aloud.

A similar tension is generated in the film All That’s Left of You by Cherien Dabis, which follows a Palestinian family across three generations during the time spanning from the 1948 Nakba to the 2020s under Israeli occupation. There is a moment in the film where the Israeli Occupation Forces hold a father and his young son at gunpoint on the side of the road, and demand that the father yell out that his son’s mother is a whore. It is a moment that’s impossible to consume passively.

You feel the rupture - in the father’s body and your own, heart dropping into stomach - as he is forced to “choose” between protecting his child’s life and his dignity. You feel the rupture - in the child’s body and your own, heart caught in throat - as he is forced to witness his father “choose” between defending his life and his mother’s honour. You feel, viscerally, what breaks within and between the father and his child when he chooses their safety over their dignity - two core needs that should never have to be weighed against each other. In that moment, the argument for picking up arms as a means of resisting indignity becomes undeniable in one’s viscera - a clarity so sharp that it cuts through the pacifying rhetoric of non-violence and the deliberately misleading propaganda of “terrorism.”

Whether it be June Jordan’s poetry or this moment in All That’s Left of You, revolutionary art takes the glaring contradictions, the multiple truths, and co-existing “both/ands” out of the airy (and easily manipulatable) transience of our minds and locates them within the earth of our bodies. It makes us feel the tension - expanding our capacity to feel more vs. feel better - and develop a visceral relationship to it vs. just consuming or acknowledging it.

Put differently, revolutionary art moves us. And that movement is where our work begins. To be moved is a deeply human quality, and it is our responsibility to integrate that which moves us.

To be moved is a deeply human quality and it is one that the dominant systems seek to manipulate. They seek to move us just enough that we continue to consume, but not so much that we revolt. They seek to move us in ways that make us easier to control, rather than in ways that reconnect us with our sense of agency. In that, it is not enough to be moved. We must interrogate and integrate what moved us and why.

Movement demands integration and integration creates the space and capacity to be moved once more. Conversely, a lack of integration can be overwhelming to the point that we lose our ability to be moved. We become robotic and mechanical in our responses (or lack thereof) rather than embodied and dynamic. We become easier to control and predict. If, in Octavia E. Butler’s words, “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change” then, in failing to integrate, we slowly lose our ability to touch and be touched, we lose our ability to change and be changed, we lose our connection to truth, and we lose our ability to conceive of, believe in, and be guided by/towards that which is bigger than any one of us, that which we cannot yet see.

As Quill Christie-Peters shares in her book, On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation,

“To be whole is to be present enough in our bodies to viscerally feel all that they contain…To be whole is to remember we are part of the whole - an agentive and discrete being who is also cradled by many threads of creation that weave us within a larger web of responsibility and purpose that extends to us from the great beyond. To be whole is to remember that our body is not just our physical form but also contains the smoke of the great beyond that accesses living knowledge from our ancestors, our spirits, and the celestial heartbeat of our existence. To be whole is to experience fleeting or permanent presence in our bodies, despite the pain, in order to live out responsibilities that echo from the great beyond as calls for justice and liberation. The settler colonial world has always been afraid of this.”

THE PIECES I AM: An Offering From Me To You

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather me and give them back to me in all the right order.”

- Toni Morrison, Beloved

While I can’t do your integration work for you, I can hold you in that process - as a friend of your mind, a guide for your body, a mirror to your spirit, and an enemy of empire. If I can support you in gathering the pieces - of a project, of seemingly disconnected ideas floating around in your head, of a pros and cons list that is resisting a decision, of a relationship dynamic, of a conflict, etc. - feel free to get in touch by filling out this short form.

When we invest in integration, we clear the space to imagine and feel into what we want (desire) and unlock the ability to take action towards realizing it (agency).

This essay, for example, includes quotes and ideas from at least ten different sources that I’ve encountered over the last few months. None of them integrated me on their own. Each of them moved or activated me in some way and it was up to me to pay attention, gather the seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces - their only obvious throughline being that they elicited a reaction from the same body, my body - and struggle with them until they fell together into a narrative that I could yield to, one I could trust.

In this way, integration is not just a means of understanding the external world. It is a weaving of the micro and the macro. It is an x-ray into the body, the vessel that is constantly being changed by the changing world around it, and in return, shaping that world through action.

May we become undone and remade whole, again and again, until we are free. Holla if I can help, in the undoing, the remaking, or both.

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

“Love” is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving – a choice we make over and over again. If love is sweet labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.”

- Valarie Kaur

“Practice is your center. What do you do repeatedly because it’s life-giving? And what can you offer from that place?”

- Sendolo Diaminah

“I want to assert that I only write because I want to remain steadfast and stalwart in captivity. My writing is not a testament to my love of poetic language or my desire to be published.”

- Walid Daqqa

—

Beginning in Fall 2023, I found myself writing first weekly, then biweekly, and eventually monthly love letters to the revolution. When I started, akin to falling in love, I couldn’t eat, sleep, or think about anything else as I was writing them. I lost track of time, and basic needs became afterthoughts in the presence of a pen and observations that demanded synthesis. I watched and I listened and I transcribed and I re-membered so much of what my bones already knew, what my ancestors had already passed down, what the land already embodies. I shared my writing as it came out of me, as a way of learning in public and honoring my commitment to documenting my thinking as it evolves.

What we pay attention to grows, as adrienne maree brown would say, and so did my love for movement. I saw its vulnerabilities, the gaps between its intentions and impact, its susceptibility to co-optation. My love deepened in a way that demanded more time in between love letters to struggle through what these insights meant for my relationship to movement. Obsession matured into practice. I needed to eat, sleep, and walk for long distances to metabolize what I was taking in. I needed to scream on the streets, cry with strangers, and lie on the ground and let the earth work on me. I needed to draw connections across time and space, weave threads between histories and geographies, and dissolve the silos erected within my mind and on the page. I am not surprised that the love letter that went low-key ‘viral’, and continues to resurface months later today, was the one that saw the widest and reached the deepest.

I believe that to be loved is to be understood and to love is to understand. In that, these letters are a reflection of what I’ve understood of our movements in this moment. I’ve been told repeatedly that my superpower is to see things and people as they are, and reflect it back to them on time, in potent, poetic, and powerful ways. It’s the kind of love that friends have described as “violent listening,” “soul penetration,” and “I feel personally attacked…and seen. Keep it coming.” In that, it feels fitting that “OOF” is the most frequent piece of immediate feedback that I’ve received to the love letters that make up this space. My body has proven time and again to be my most reliable truth detector, and it means something to me that the first reaction to my words has been a visceral one.

That said, when I shared the framing of ‘love letters to the revolution’ with my dear friend Hima, she cautioned, “Is there a way to foreground how YOU write love letters? You don’t sugarcoat, you don’t flower, you don’t say what people want to hear, you speak truth. They’re not lust letters. They’re not superficial. They’re true love letters. You see into the soul of a person - and in this case, a movement - and you tell the truth. I just wouldn’t want that depth to get lost in all the ways that capitalism has diluted love letters.” Heeding Hima’s words, consider this is me telling you how I write love letters.

These letters hold the truth that as our movements grow in power, so does their vulnerability, that the closer we get to liberation, the harder it becomes to discern between it and its deepfake equivalents.

The letters are an account of my own journey of discernment, of not only identifying, defining, and questioning the places where we are prone to the master’s tools, but also unpacking the ick of why these illusions remain attractive to us despite a world on fire. We need to know the anatomy of a tumor before we can excise it. We need to know how it has already changed our shape and negotiated our complicity before we can stop it from metastasizing further. The letters lay us bare before ourselves - exposed, yet held through that exposure - so that we may confront the cancerous beliefs, norms, and systems of our time with care for our bodies, precision in our movements, and clarity around our context.

In one of the earlier letters, I write, “I want to be changed by this moment, to the extent that my existence, on a cellular level, becomes fundamentally incompatible with the conditions that allowed this reality to manifest in the first place.” This space is a comrade on that journey - equal parts compass and mirror, hard surface and soft landing. It is a friend committed to laboring in love - fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving - together.

A Note On Revolutionary Clarity & The Role of Documentation

There is a particular kind of clarity that emerges in revolutionary moments. The things that we knew in theory become embodied through experience, the contradictions that otherwise passed through for visits now live rent-free in our psyche, and the collective consciousness takes seemingly-but-not-actually unprecedented strides towards life.

I hear this clarity in the writings of Assata Shakur, George Jackson, and Wisam Rafeedie, among so many others. Their words were written in moments when it felt like there was no going back. Yet, we do go back. History shows that we have a pattern of going back after revolutionary moments. While revolutionary clarity cuts through the noise, our systems are such that, at some point, the noise - fueled by propaganda, trauma, and so many of the -isms - does take back its ground. And when it does, it is revolutionary texts like that of Shakur and Jackson and Rafeedie that have reminded me that the fight is long, that we are a part of a much longer and richer lineage, and that we don’t have to start from scratch. Our contexts might be different, but their clarity and conviction, once I’ve done the work of right-sizing it to my context, has helped me stay in the fight through despair and dejection.

It has been reflected back to me that there is a similar clarity in this compilation of love letters. People have shared that they revisit these words, as groups and as individuals, to find language, to hold nuance, to return to their bodies, and ultimately, to stay in the fight. This is one of my reasons for wanting to preserve it here - for this moment and the future - beyond an Instagram page that is at the whims of Meta.

My ask of you as you move through this space, as well as any of the resources it references, is to document your learnings and reflections as you go. Document the ways in which your shape changes. Document the clarity that now feels undeniable. Document the patterns you can no longer unsee. You don’t have to do so publicly, but document them nonetheless.

Echoing the words of Fathima Cader, shared during an interview on the intimacies of solidarity:

“To all our comrades doing solidarity work in these devastating times, please archive as you go. One day we will look back, but the records of our kinships will have been destroyed. Israel is flattening libraries, which Sri Lanka did too, and this is also happening in Sudan right now. Canada’s residential school systems tried to eradicate Indigenous languages.

Since the beginning of the Nakba, Palestinians have been unwavering in recording their history and their resistance. This is inspiring. History will be rewritten, so we must be our own archivists.”

In short, let it be a tale.

A Table of Context

All bodies of work come from a place. This introduction emerges from all the love letters that preceded it. Below is a table of context of all the love letters that are archived in this space - oldest to newest - for you to access and/or share with ease as you need. Reading the titles alone will give you a sense of the questions, contradictions, and reflections that make up the soil from which future love letters will sprout.

1. Love & Power

2. Love as Labor

3. Love & Knowledge

4. Love & Wonder

5. Land & Bodies in the Time of Wildfires

6. Movement, Stakes & Bodies in the Time of War

7. The Stories We Tell In the Time of Apartheid

8. Dehumanization in the Time of Genocide

9. Grieving as Movement Work in the Time of Systemic Gaslighting

10. Learning to Feel More vs. Feel Better in the Time of Mass Atrocities

11. Unpacking Relationships to Terror in the Time of Mass Propaganda

12. Remembrance as Endurance in the Time of Targeted Erasure

13. Teaching Life & Loving Land in the Time of Forced Displacement

14. Consistent Commitments in the Time of Arbitrary Beginnings

15. Holding Contradictions in the Time of Birthing New Worlds

16. Solidarity as a Practice in the Face of Divide-and-Conquer

17. Organizing Our Feelings as We Organize Our Movements

18. Glorifying as Dehumanizing in the Face of a ‘Resilient’ Oppressed

19. Co-existing Hope & Despair in the Time of False Binaries

20. Seeking Recognition within Capitalist Colonial Systems

21. Threats to Mass Movements c/o Threatened Systems of Oppression

22. Performance as Direct Action for Metabolizing ‘These Times’

23. A Truer Litmus Test in the Time of Raging Inferno

24. Re-membering Revolution is Not the Heimlich in the Time of Chokeholds & Saviors

25. Solidarity as a Love Story in the Time of Compounding Grief

26. Re-membering we are choked & still we breathe

27. Unpacking our Resistance to Oppression as a Structure

28. Jamming A Moral Peg in an Economic Hole in the Time of “Do the Right Thing”

29. Sacrifice & Martyrdom in the Face of Death-Making Systems

30. The Role of Faith in the Fight to Shift Our Material Conditions

31. Recalibrating Our Relationship to Repression & Joy Amidst the Threat of Resignation

32. Love Letters to Conflict: Postcards from the Pursuit of Understanding

33. Quote Convo: On the Difference Between Hope & Faith

34. Quote Convo: On Justice & Satisfaction

35. Quote Convo: On Fighting Like a Flea

36. Quote Convo: On the Seriousness of Love, and Revolution as a Series of Heartbreaks

37. Unpacking Humanization as a Flawed Frame

38. Reflecting on Returning to Love & Not Wanting to Be Here

39. Quote Convo: On the Futility of “Guilty” and “Innocent” Within Criminal Systems

40. Reflecting on Getting Up A Little Slowly & a Lot More Deadly

41. Quote Convo: Resolving the Contradictions Among Us as the Work of Revolution

42. Quote Convo: A Case for Supporting Political Prisoners

43. Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Telling the Truth

44. Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Weaving the Micro & the Macro

45. Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Holding & Metabolizing Contradictions

46. Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Practicing Curiosity

47. Quote Convo: The Politics That Guide the Gun

48. Quote Convo: Creative Work vs. Material Work; Rehearsal vs. Revolution

49. Deconstructing & Reconstructing Our Relationship to Discipline Within Carceral Systems

50. Quote Convo: On Sharpening Each Other, Without Severing From Each Other

51. Rewiring Our Relationship to Freedom & Discipline Within Transactional Systems

52. The Dismantling Distinction: What Readers Have Had to Say

53. On Paid Subscriptions: Pay Well, Not Paywall

54. This letter!

55. You and I will know soon enough :)

The love letters shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

As I wrote when I launched the original Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit in 2022, “This toolkit is being made openly available because we can no longer afford for this work to be financially inaccessible.” That still remains true.

What is also true is that I dream of an existence that is one day fully funded by the people who are moved by this work.

The paid subscription is deliberately set at $5.55 CAD/month because I would much rather be held by many hands that are able to contribute a small amount (i.e. the price of a coffee, each month), vs. large amounts contributed by a few hands. I believe money carries energy and I don’t want you to be set back by your contribution to my practice. I want it to be an amount that you can offer with a sense of generosity.

If you want to contribute more1, as some of you have asked, you can purchase the Founding Members subscription at $111.11CAD/year (~$9.25 CAD/month), or buy a subscription for others in your life who you think would appreciate this work. For those of you who have access to professional development funds, feel free to buy subscriptions for you and your team using these funds.

All subscriptions - free, paid, or Founding Member - will have access to the same work. As my friend Sydney described it, “it’s not a paywall, it’s a pay well.” A well is a deep hole in the ground from which people obtain water. The deeper the well, the greater and more sustained access to water. The deeper the pockets, the greater and more sustained access to funds.

A paywall says no.

A pay well says, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”2

On that note, the following reflection from political prisoner and former Black Panther Party member Sundiata Acoli on the shortcomings of the Party in Look For Me In the Whirlwind has been living rent-free in my head since I read it. I’d be lying if I said that its description of economic self-reliance hasn’t also influenced my thinking and decision around enabling paid subscriptions as an option.

“6. Failure to organize economic foundations in the community: The BPP preached socialist politics. It was anti-capitalist and this skewed its concept of building economic foundations in the community. The Party often gave the impression that to engage in any business enterprise was to engage in capitalism and it too frequently looked with disdain upon the small business people in the community. As a result, the BPP built few businesses which generated income other than The Black Panther newspaper, or which could provide self-employment to its membership and to people in the community. The BPP failed to encourage the Black community to set up its own businesses as a means of building an independent economic foundation which could help break "outsiders" control of the Black community's economics and move it toward economic self-reliance.”

My Commitments to You (& Me)

In inviting you into a more intimate relationship with this work (i.e. materially resourcing it), here are my commitments to myself and to you:

1. I will write, not because you are paying me to, but because I write to stay alive. You are not paying me to write, rather you are paying me to exist - within systems that require payment to exist - so that I can learn and synthesize that learning through writing.

2. I will share my thinking, not because you are paying me to, but because I am sharpened by the process of interrogating my thoughts to the extent that I am able to explain them in clear and compelling ways to those that aren’t in my head/body.

3. I will write, because I am a writer and in the words of Solmaz Sharif, “The duty of the writer…is to remind us that we will die. And that we aren’t dead yet.”

4. I will be consistent, and there’s something about the “you will receive an essay from me every Monday at 9:00AM”-esque commitment that feels less (in my body) like discipline and more like “dance monkey dance.” My relationship to my writing practice is one that is rooted in reverence and readiness. I revere the experience of becoming a vessel/channel for creativity to flow through, for ideas to connect, for patterns to make themselves known, and for experiences to find words. Equally, I see it as my responsibility to cultivate, maintain, and strengthen that vessel/channel so that I am ready to receive words that want to come through me with clarity and rigor. In that, I am not writing for an audience, I am writing to honor that which chooses to come through me. If you look back at the archive of essays from the last three years, you’ll see that there were seasons of shorter, weekly/biweekly essays, followed by seasons of longer, monthly essays, and more recently, month-long hiatuses followed by keynote-length, multi-part essays and/or meditations. All of that to say, consistency for me is not about pumping out a weekly newsletter. Rather, it is about meeting, learning, understanding, and writing what feels honest, on time, and on purpose.

Beyond these commitments, here’s what you - the readers of Dismantling the Master’s Tools - have reflected back to me about the value of this work:

• It shares love & truth, together.

• It stirs a reaction in people’s bodies, not just their minds.

• It makes radical, accessible.

• It gives people language to make sense of what they’re experiencing and why.

• (Beyond sense-making), it helps people stay in the fight.

• (Beyond sense-making), it moves people to action.

• It holds width, without compromising depth.

^This is also what you can expect of what’s to come.

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

I’m a researcher, so I went through and themed the feedback I’ve received around this work (originally captured in the “What readers are saying…” series on the Dismantling the Master’s Tools Instagram page), so I could answer this question in an evidence-based way. These are the themes that emerged + some of the quotes that support it:

According to you, Dismantling the Master’s Tools, as a body of work, is distinct in that:

It shares love & truth, together.

• “I also share your work as a tool for connection. It’s a standard for how one can share love and truth together. It’s the stuff that people say is hard to talk about, yet you show us that it’s not. That it’s a labor of love.”

• “You strike an impeccable balance of justice, truth, accountability, and freedom, with love, understanding, compassion and grace for both our history, present, and future…Your ability to facilitate difficult conversations is an art worth engaging in. I love how you challenge us to be better human and to reach our fullest potential. You challenge us to be better, do better, and love better. And it’s hard, but you remind me that it’s worth it.”

• “Such a good callout for me <3 Thank you for teaching us about being in solidarity.”

• Thanks for curating + creating so generously, then calling us in so gently.”

• “Thank you for your analysis and heart.”

• “So fucking powerful. This whole account makes me sit up in ways I always hoped higher education would. This IS higher education - fostering the marriage of love, justice, and intellectualism. Intellectualism stripped of love and revolution is just self-gratuitous mental masturbation and I have no care for it.”

• “This is so indicative of how you have such a unique voice. You can be in something that’s like a liberal space - like “dialogue” and “having conversations” - and you can still be radical but so welcoming. I feel like that’s really hard to do. You still maintain your radical edge of resistance, but also not alienate people. There’s a warmth and a playfulness and a responsiveness.”

It stirs a reaction in people’s bodies, not just their minds.

• “The way that I learn from you is the other way. It starts in the body and it eventually percolates and rises to the point where it can be intellectualized and understood in that cognitive level.”

• “Oof. every word in these slides feeling like medicine for my lil broken heart.”

• “Every time I read your posts, I’m crying in my bed. I can’t read them before a meeting. I need time to take it in.”

• “The first pages of Dismantling the Master’s Tools prepared me for the context; but I was not prepared for love. For the tingly sensations, and words that felt like they were meeting the deepest parts of me, so effortlessly. For the way I was held, without being touched. This kind of love required my undivided attention.”

• “Thank you for describing something so visceral so clearly.”

• “When I tell you reading this takes my breath away, considering this approach gives me some kind of life…”

• “Reading this returned oxygen to my cells. I’m so thankful for this reflection.”

• “Your written words about holding and seeing the contradictions with much more expansiveness has been medicine that has allowed me to begin alchemizing my previous rigidity…it feels better in my body and spirit. Giving thanks, always.”

• “Gonna read this over and over until it lives in my bones”

• “People really appreciated the somatic exercise - that’s your superpower, your understanding of the body. It’s disarming. Because you understand the body so well, you know how to disarm it.”

It makes radical, accessible.

• “Making radical accessible”

• “I told people in my life to follow you. My mom follows you. My cousins follow you.”

• “Thank you for creating pieces that help people digest huge concepts”

• “I also sent it directly to my mom, I felt like it might help contextualize some things for her and hopefully move her to action.”

• “I also really appreciate how you’ve brought knowledge that is normally hidden or written in overly complicated terms, into something that’s accessible to everyone!”

• “You’re naming so much of the invisible and underlying and trying to be hidden in such an accessible way.”

• “A beautiful way to break something down in a way that helps people be more critical and analytical of this happening in our day to day.”

• “Per usual, [your posts] are “deceptively” simple & damn deep. I often have to re-read so things truly settle.”

It gives people language to make sense of what they’re experiencing and why.

• “It expresses so clearly something I’ve been feeling / thinking around the edges of but unable to speak with clarity.”

• “You have helped me to synthesize the days this past year. To read you after the horrors of each day is to know that it’s not all in vain. That all this matters. It helps sustain me through the fight and relentlessness that is required to reach justice.”

• “Always holding Mathura Mahendren’s words close but the thoughts she’s penned at Dismantling the Master’s Tools the last few months have been ever so important for this moment and hold space for the language we’ve yet to create as we continue in this movement.”

• “This has been so helpful…thank you for putting language to this insidious dehumanizing perspective of glorification.”

• “We shared it as a resource at the organizing workshop. It’s just so good…it’s like you’re processing on behalf of all of us. That combo of political organizing with emotions is just…OOF.”

• “I needed every word. This past year I’ve experienced despair like never before. It’s terrible and disorienting. This post helped me understand why and also some hope for how to move through it.”

• “Much needed read at this stage of the movement. It’s so amazing to read this and realise ‘ahhh that’s what it was!’...It’s like you read my mind!! It’s exactly what we’re going through atm here in Melbourne.”

• “The thing you do with words is something else. Your handle on language is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I’m like, “Yes! Say that to me again!!””

• “I’ve sent this to so many people! Such a valuable framework! There are so many conceptual pieces gathered here that reflect bits and pieces floating in the ether of my mind that I haven’t been able to fully put all together.”

• “Thank you so much for these. They clarify many aspects of why I am struggling to see ways forward, and how solidarity and local struggles are connected.”

(Beyond sense-making), it helps people stay in the fight.

• “Your post also came to me at a time when I was feeling a lot of rage, and it was a great reminder of the softness and love of that rage. We’re also experiencing lots of movement fractures at the moment and it is a very timely moment to share your words and remind everyone why we’re here. Thank you so much.”

• “Your labor of love helps me get out of bed on these unbearable days.”

• “The way hope and despair are positioned in this post may literally give you hope again.”

• “Thank you for this! I’m seeing all of these in action and it is validating and fortifying to remember this is a strategy to wear us down. We will not give up. Your wisdom gives some serious leadership so needed right now.”

• “I keep going back to these words in order to hold the current moment.”

• “I keep coming back to them when I’m in complete despair and when it feels like my heart is literally cracking open.”

• “So often I hear (and have personally experienced) the belief that the only way we can ensure survival is to not be distracted or taken by our emotions. I appreciate this thread because it reframes and clearly offers a framework for how connection AND attunement to our feelings and others is a key component in organizing and liberation work.”

• “Your synthesis saves lives (mine). Militant strategy. Heart work. Real shit.”

• “twice I scrolled past these posts because i knew they were going to get me and i wasn’t ready. i was right. feel readier now. thank you. resignation is…seductive. your point on not taking repression personally is very helpful. helps me to hold my fear rather than be overwhelmed by it, helps me step back from ego.”

(Beyond sense-making), it moves people to action.

• “What a much needed guide to help people continue to show up during this ongoing massacre.”

• “I really appreciate the clear, actionable language right now.”

• “Just wanted to share that your deeply insightful work is being looked to for guidance by the Health Workers Alliance for Palestine group.”

• “Thank you for the in-depth and always insightful FIRE. I feel more equipped going into our Zio city council meeting.”

• “Reading your work moved me to reach out to people I had collaborated with previously in a community organizing effort last year and to offer to transfer them more money for their contribution than what we had agreed on at the time.”

It holds width, without compromising depth.

• “This whole carousel captures the widest aperture of various feelings that have flooded me since mid-October. Yet in a deeper, more eloquent, more concrete way than I had words or understanding for. A mini masterclass.”

• “Thank you for combining so much and seeing so wide.”

• “I feel like this post created the beginnings of the best and healthiest neural networks. There’s so much to reflect on in this post.”

• “Your capacity to move in and out of macro systemic change with movement-building and micro moments of relational change and deepening is felt across multiple times, spaces, and dimensions.”

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

As I’ve shared in the past, Spring Solstice is my new year, Pisces season is my December, and the process of writing this birthday reflection each year is the closest I can bring myself to a year-end review in These Times.

The intention for this year was no different, but life had other plans.

On the same day that this baby turned four years old, my grandmother - its great-grandmother - ascended from this realm. The grief that accompanied her loss brought with it both chaos and clarity, as grief does. Writing now from the other side of that chaos, the clarity is what remains.

Every year, I look back at the essays I’ve written in the year that passed and the titles alone tell a story.

Every year, I look back at the previous year’s intention and am humbled by all the ways in which it has threaded through the past 12 months.

Every year, I set an intention for the year to come - an intention that usually reveals itself, first vaguely and then undeniably, in the weeks leading up to February 22.

This year is no different.

If this year’s essays came with a table of contents, this is how it would read:

• Love Letters to Conflict: Postcards from the Pursuit of Understanding

• Quote Convo: On the Difference Between Hope & Faith

• Quote Convo: On Justice & Satisfaction

• Quote Convo: On Fighting Like a Flea

• Quote Convo: On the Seriousness of Love, and Revolution as a Series of Heartbreaks

• Unpacking Humanization as a Flawed Frame

• Reflecting on Returning to Love & Not Wanting to Be Here

• Quote Convo: On the Futility of “Guilty” and “Innocent” Within Criminal Systems

• Reflecting on Getting Up A Little Slowly & a Lot More Deadly

• Quote Convo: Resolving the Contradictions Among Us as the Work of Revolution

• Quote Convo: A Case for Supporting Political Prisoners

• Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Telling the Truth

• Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Weaving the Micro & the Macro

• Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Holding & Metabolizing Contradictions

• Core Skills for the Futures We Want: Practicing Curiosity

• Quote Convo: The Politics That Guide the Gun

• Quote Convo: Creative Work vs. Material Work; Rehearsal vs. Revolution

• Deconstructing & Reconstructing Our Relationship to Discipline Within Carceral Systems

• Quote Convo: On Sharpening Each Other, Without Severing From Each Other

• Rewiring Our Relationship to Freedom & Discipline Within Transactional Systems

While I probably write the same number of words each year, the cadence has looked different in each cycle.

In 2023, the essays were weekly/bi-weekly as a means of survival - I needed to get the words out of my body that often to preserve some semblance of sanity.

In 2024, they became monthly but longer in length (shoutout to Instagram carousel limits going from 10 slides to 20). I needed more time to synthesize what I was taking in, and I had more space to do so.

In 2025, there were droughts and floods. There were entire months I went without publishing a word, and then a one-hour keynote, a three-part post, and/or a series of meditations would come barreling out of me.

This year reaffirmed for me that my commitment to consistency has never been about publishing.

My commitment is to writing, through drought and flood.

My commitment is to show up to the page, again and again, and do the work of clearing the channels for the words to come through.

The intention that I had set a year ago for this past year was presence - to be here. To be here with this moment, here with our bodies, here with this world, here with our truth, and here with the increasingly-incompatible-with-life conditions.

And while I had named in that reflection that it was about to get a lot harder to be here, finding myself admitting out loud that I don’t want to be here just six months after I had set this intention, was both a little too on the nose and entirely true.

Looking back at the essays from this past year, each one documents one or more of the calibrations I had to make - within my understanding, my embodiment, and/or my spirit - in order to continue being here.

And now, as my baby enters its fourth year, these are the questions that are circling:

• What does it mean to shield what is vulnerable without snuffing out what is growing?

• What does it mean to honour sovereignty alongside interdependence?

• What does it mean to offer one’s body as a vessel and/or vehicle for that which is ready to take form?

• What does it mean to give up something of value in order to create the conditions for something we want to unfold?

• What does it look like to insist on wholeness during transitions where one (and the world) becomes wholly undone?

• What does integrity look like in the oft-invisibilized work of sustaining life, within systems that reward death-making?

What has clarified since February 22, however, is the thread that connects all of these questions.

The thread that I’ve simultaneously grappled with and run from my whole life.

The thread that my grandmother - our family’s matriarch - clarified for me in her passing.

The thread that has my Cancer Rising wrapped around its finger.

Mothering.

In Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, authors Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams define mothering as “creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life.”

In the book’s preface, Loretta J. Ross writes,

“Women are socialized (not created) to care for others and to expect others to care for them. Mothering, radically defined, is the glad gifting of one’s talents, ideas, intellect, and creativity to the universe without recompense.”

Ross goes on to ask,

“How do we get from a conservative definition of mothering as a biological destiny to mothering as a liberating practice that can thwart runaway capitalism?”

Cynthia Dewi Oka builds on this question in her essay, Mothering as Revolutionary Praxis:

“Mothering is a primary front in this struggle, not as a biological function, but as a social practice…The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies. It presents a fundamental contradiction to the logic of capitalism, which unmoors us from each other.”

She speaks of mothering as a means of sharpening the contradictions that catalyze revolution.

I know now that I needed to figure out how to be here this past year, because the matriarchy is child-centered. Life-centered. Future-centered.

The matriarchy demands presence no matter what’s on fire. The matriarchy requires us to be here even when we don’t want to be, because we understand that it’s ultimately not about us anymore (and perhaps it never was). It’s about that which is, and those who are, vulnerable and growing, sovereign and interdependent, invisibilized yet insistent on life.

We tend to romanticize and glorify dying for the revolution. What about living - not just surviving, not just preparing for less painful ways to die, but actually LIVING - for the revolution? Living as in staying alive and keeping each other alive within death-making systems so that we can continue to revolt, continue to insist on life over death, continue to breathe and push through a series of escalating (in pain, speed, and intensity) contractions to bring forth new life. If martyrs are those who die for the revolution, mothers are those who live (and keep life alive) - despite all odds - for the revolution.

I have both heard and experienced that the practice of mothering summons an unparalleled clarity that guides action, an unmatched courage to do whatever it takes to protect the life that is entrusted to you, and a willingness and ability (love & power) to rise to levels of change, discomfort, and risk that previously felt out of reach.

Living into the intention of mothering this year has already insisted on greater change, discomfort, and risk in how I approach this work of Dismantling the Master’s Tools - including where it’s hosted.

More to come on that, and its new home, soon.

Until then,

all my love,

Mathura Temwa Mahendren

“You will be turned inside out. If not during the birth, then during the pregnancy, if not the pregnancy, by the nursing, by the sleeplessness night, the mind-bending loneliness, sooner or later you will break down. You will think, believe you cannot go on. You will realize that if you ever thought that facing yourself, the bloody, ugly, sublime truth of yourself was the ultimate responsibility, you were wrong. It is to face yourself and realize you cannot run away because another life, your child’s, depends on this ultimate self-encounter.

Welcome to mamahood.

I am trying to articulate the blood and muscle, the tears, the shaking, how it is no longer really a choice, of whether or not you will have the courage to not run away from your own fear, panic, lack of self-control. It is something beyond and before courage. It is a visceral sense that vulnerable, quivering life is breaking you and you have to let it. It is not self-sacrifice. It may not even qualify as love. It isn’t sweet. It isn’t romantic. It may traumatize you, keep you up at night, the memory of that moment when you had to face your worst and best and really you aren’t sure if you came out the winner or the loser.

The only word you have is revolution.”

Mai’a Williams, Revolutionary Mothering

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

These systems also shape how we understand the relationship between freedom and discipline.

If freedom is “the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint” capitalism has taught us that freedom can be bought. Freedom is a transaction. It can be bought with capital. For those of us without access to capital, proximity to freedom can be bought through compliance, obedience, and following the rules set by those with access to capital.

Under these conditions, we come to relate to discipline as the cost of freedom. A means to an end. We pay this cost begrudgingly, we scrutinize our return on investment, and we are constantly looking at ways to get more bang for our buck.

We see this transactional mindset play out when, in moments of being offered crumbs of “freedom” (e.g. access to capital, airtime in the media, representation, “ceasefire”, “a seat at the table”, etc.) by the dominant systems, we abandon our discipline.

We don’t even see it as abandonment, because under capitalism, we paid the cost (discipline), we got our product (“freedom”), and we don’t owe anyone anything else.

In Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions, political prisoner and former Black Panther Party member Sundiata Acoli articulates some of the shortcomings of the BPP that were rooted in a lack of discipline:

“1. Leadership corrupted: COINTELPRO eventually intimidated and corrupted all three of the BPP’s top leaders: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. Each, in his own way, caved in to the pressures and began acting in a manner that was designed deliberately to destroy the BPP and to disillusion not only Party members but Afrikan people in America for years to come. COINTELPRO’s hopes were that Afrikans in America would be so disillusioned that never again would they trust or follow any African leader or organization which advocated real solutions to Black oppression.”

3. Rhetoric outstripped capabilities: Although the BPP was adept at the art of propaganda and made very good use of its own and the establishment’s media, still too many Panthers fell into the habit of making boisterous claims in the public media, or selling “wolf tickets” that they couldn’t back up. Eventually, they weren’t taken seriously anymore. The press, some of whom were police agents, often had only to stick a microphone under a Panther’s nose to make him or her begin spouting rhetoric. This often played into the hands of those who were simply looking for slanderous material to air or to provide possible intelligence information to the police.

5. Dogmatism: Early successes made some Panthers feel that they were the only possessors of absolute truths. Some became arrogant and dogmatic in their dealings with Party members, other organizations, and even the community. This turned people off.”

In another chapter of Look for Me in the Whirlwind, political prisoner and former Black Panther Party member Sekou Odinga details the ways in which he and his peers saw Huey Newton shift as he gained access to more power.

“There were issues about where Huey was living and how much rent he was paying while so many rank-and-file Panthers were living collectively in virtual poverty…We felt that the more power and money Huey got, the softer he got. We read this as Huey becoming more reformist, developing bourgeois tendencies which weren’t compatible with what we had been taught and were teaching. He was becoming very dictatorial, demanding that he be called the “Supreme Commander.” At this time, it seemed like Huey was mainly thinking about and talking about himself: “I did this, and I did that: I, I, I.””

This strategy of the state offering movement leaders some form of “freedom” (e.g. financial resources, airtime in the media, recognition, impunity etc.) in exchange for some level of deradicalization long preceded (and succeeded) the Black Panther Party.

In another chapter of Look for Me in the Whirlwind, Sundiata Acoli shares another example of this strategy as it was deployed in the early 60s, before the BPP was formed.

“In 1963, Malcolm X openly called the March on Washington a farce. He explained that the desire for a mass march on the nation’s capital originally sprang from the Black grassroots: the average Black man and woman in the streets. It was their way of demonstrating a mass Black demand for jobs and freedom. As momentum grew for the march, President Kennedy called a meeting of the leaders of the six largest civil rights organizations, dubbed the “Big Six” - NAACP, SCLC, CORE, National Urban League (NUL), SNCC, and the National Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Protestors (NBSCP) - asking them to stop the proposed march. They answered that they couldn’t stop it because they weren’t leading it, didn’t start it, and that it had sprung from the masses of Black people.”

Since they weren’t leading the march, the president decided to make them the leaders by distributing huge sums of money to each of the Big Six, publicizing their leading roles in the mass media, and providing them with a script to follow regarding the staging of the event. The script planned the march down to the smallest detail. Malcolm explained that government officials told the Big Six what time to begin the march, where to march, who could speak at the march and who could not, generally what could be said and what could not, what signs to carry, where to go to the toilets (provided by the government), and what time to end - and most of the 200, 000 marchers were never the wiser. By then SNCC’s membership was also criticizing the march as too moderate and decrying the violence sweeping the South. History ultimately provided Malcolm’s claim of “farce” correct, through books published by participants in the planning of the march and through exposure of government documents on the matter.”

We may abandon discipline because:

• we believe we’ve paid our dues,

• we believe we’ve “levelled up” and no longer need to practice, and/or

• we believe that our experience, our role/title, and our real or perceived power make us immune to the forces of counterinsurgency.

In this sense, discipline is a bit like oxygen - it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been breathing or how great we are at it, we still need oxygen to breathe. In the same way, freedom severed from discipline does not survive very long.

In truth, the relationship between freedom and discipline is one of reciprocity.

When we taste the gift of freedom, it is our responsibility to give back in discipline, because it was our discipline that got us to that freedom.

Discipline isn’t a cost we get to stop paying, it’s a practice that we commit to more deeply because it has allowed us to access a reality - even if just a taste of one - that was previously unimaginable.

Understanding the relationship between freedom and discipline as a reciprocal vs. transactional one, requires us to unlearn our relationship to discipline as we are taught under the dominant systems (as detailed in the last essay). It asks us to shift from:

• Discipline as punishment >> Discipline as practice

• Discipline as mind over matter >> Discipline as mindful of matter

• Discipline as building compliance >> Discipline as building trust (for collective defiance)

• Discipline as exerting control >> Discipline as exercising agency

• Discipline as an individual regimen >> Discipline as a collective practice

Each of these shifts makes the practice of discipline more sustainable, more life-giving, and more secure from the forces of counterinsurgency.

In many ways, discipline is the mother of freedom, and how we relate to where we come from (i.e. mother) informs who we become.

We are not above or better than that which made us, that which we come from. What we’re making is not better than what made us - believing so is a form of supremacy.

Instead, what we are making is a reflection of how we relate to what made us. The freedom we make is a reflection of how we relate to the discipline (or lack thereof) that allows us to make it. We have agency in the kind of freedom we make, but it is not separate from or better than the discipline we practice.

// Discipline is the mother of freedom. Discipline creates consistency in inconsistent conditions.

In The War Before, former political prisoner and Black Panther Party member Safiya Bukhari describes how her commitment to faith kept her grounded within maximum-security confinement:

“Being a practicing Sunni Muslim in prison was not easy Being an orthodox Muslim, a political prisoner, and a woman was unheard of…The discipline of making salat five times a day and having Allah constantly in your remembrance is a wonderful thing, because it enables you to deal with the madness around you…I could take time out from the insanity of prison life to communicate with the things that centered me.”

// Discipline is the mother of freedom. Discipline helps us build the skills to move toward what we desire.

Freedom requires love and power, and discipline is the practice that bridges the two. If love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s existence, and power is the ability to change our own or another’s circumstances, then discipline is the practice of developing the ability to realize the will.

In her memoir Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary, former political prisoner and Black Panther Party member Afeni Shakur speaks of how the BPP fostered this practice in her.

“So, the Panther Party for me, at that time, clarified my situation,” she says. “They took my rage and channeled it against them [she points outside], instead of us [she holds her heart]. They educated my mind and gave me direction. With that direction came hope, and I loved them for giving me that. Because I never had hope in my life. I never dreamed of a better place or hoped for a better world for my mama, my sister, and me. I just never did. They took me and looked at me and said: ‘Afeni, you are strong so use your strength to help the weak. You are smart, so use your mind to teach the ignorant.’ And that’s what I did.”

// Discipline is the mother of freedom. Discipline inoculates us to sacrifice and consequences.

Even when we relate to freedom and discipline through a lens of reciprocity, freedom still has a cost. Freedom requires sacrifice or “giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy.”

Discipline helps us practice sacrifice. And when freedom arrives with its consequences in tow, the discipline of our previous selves prepares us to understand and face these consequences as systemic rather than personal - they are a result of us living by values that pose an existential threat to the status quo.

In her memoir, former political prisoner (held in solitary confinement for 20+ months) and Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur shares an early experience of practicing sacrifice via discipline in the BPP:

“I have always hated to get up in the morning, and the sheer idea of getting up every day at 4:30 made me groan. But i thought about the children i’d let down. Getting up early should be an easy thing for a revolutionary. I thought about those who had given their lives for our struggle and decided it wasn’t so hard after all. Later, one of the sisters told me, “Don’t worry. They’ll just assign you to the breakfast program every day until you’re used to it and they can count on you to be disciplined. The same thing happened to me.”

If discipline is the mother of freedom,

what is our responsibility to that which gives us life?

what is our responsibility to that which protects us when we are vulnerable?

what is our responsibility to that which forges us into the freedom we seek - consistently through inconsistency, bridging will and ability / love and power, teaching us by example what it means to give up something we value for the sake of something bigger than us?

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

“One of the most important things that the [Black Panther] Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors. They took the Black liberation struggle out of a national context and put it in an international context.”

Assata Shakur

“Renée Good was not killed despite the fact that she’s a white woman. She was killed because she’s a white woman aligned with the cause of freedom. That means something…that lets us know that the conditions have fundamentally changed.”

Autumn Meghan Brown

“...identity politics leads us astray, leads us to surrender optimal well-being for a false sense of safety that is ultimately based on white supremacist notions that we are safer and more at home with our “own kind.””

bell hooks

“Minnesota turns up and turns out regardless of who is killed by law enforcement…Because that’s what solidarity and moving in a multiracial formation actually means… The vast majority of what you’re seeing is the result of years of building multiracial movement.”

Autumn Meghan Brown

A knife can be used to sharpen, and a knife can be used to sever.

We need to be able to sharpen each other, without severing from each other.

We can’t let the fear of severing keep us from sharpening each other.

Severing is one of the master’s tools.

So is dulling the knife, and diluting our politic and/or demands.

Sharpening - our politic, our strategies, our skills, and our will - is necessary to protect and sustain struggles for liberation.

We are taught to believe and fear that sharpening will catalyze severing when, in reality, dulling the knife and diluting our demands can very well lead to the same end.

“Whatever is unprincipled, incorrect, & counterproductive about you and your style of work, you have to be willing to subject to the rapier knife of revolutionary criticism if you are serious about creating a revolution.”

Safiya Bukhari

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

This applies to the practice of discipline as well.

Our understanding of discipline has been subject to the influence of colonization, white supremacy, capitalism, and carcerality. Knowing exactly how is key to metabolizing our resistance to practicing discipline as a tool for our collective liberation.

Present-day definitions of discipline range from:

• “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behaviour, using punishment to correct disobedience.”

• “the self-control that is gained by requiring that rules or orders be obeyed, and the ability to keep working at something that is difficult.”

• “to carefully control the way that you work, live, or behave, especially to achieve a goal.”

• “control gained by enforcing obedience or order.”

Control, obedience, rules, order, and punishment are all common themes.

At its root, however, discipline derives from the Latin discipulus, which means “to learn.”

How did we get from a practice rooted in learning, to a practice rooted in control, obedience, and punishment?

Within movement spaces, is our resistance to discipline rooted in a resistance to learning, or a resistance to control, obedience, and punishment?

Understanding this gap requires a deconstruction and rewiring of the beliefs we hold and have been fed around discipline.

SHIFT 1

FROM: Discipline as Punishment

TO: Discipline as Practice

Much of how we are taught to relate to discipline within a carceral state is through the lens of punishment. It is something that happens to us.

Whether it be within schools, workplaces, or the streets, we are disciplined for disobeying the so-called rules and have “disciplinary action” taken against us.

Within bodies yearning for self-determination, bodies yearning to resist imposed authority, the practice of discipline can feel counterintuitive.

It can feel like we are policing ourselves. That’s not entirely untrue. When we relate to discipline as a punishment, it’s natural to avoid it, fear it, resist it.

However, when we relate to discipline as a practice of learning how to embody a particular way of being, there’s more space for mistakes, iteration and growth.

SHIFT 2

FROM: Discipline as ‘Mind over Matter’

TO: Discipline as Mindful of Matter

Whether it be posters at the gym or posts on our feed, “discipline > motivation” and “mind over matter” are common catchphrases wielded in the name of habit-building. Discipline is framed as a force that is exacted by the mind over the body. A relationship of control. A relationship of dominance. It engages the body solely as a tool, a means to an end.

“Discipline means never, ever, ever letting your mood dictate what you do. You have to take action first because movement changes your mood,” someone on Reddit says. I don’t completely disagree.

For me, however, discipline over motivation doesn’t mean ignoring my body or how I’m feeling. It means understanding just HOW MUCH and how consistently the systems we live in invest in our demoralization. It’s understanding that how I feel in my body and how I’m thinking isn’t separate from what’s happening in the world around me.

Discipline doesn’t mean override your feelings, it means organize them.1 It means contextualize them. Discipline is discerning how much of what I’m feeling is conditioning and how much of it is a genuine ask from the body. We want to unlearn the conditioning and honour the genuine requests.

When we override our feelings instead of organizing them, we break trust with our bodies. Our bodies are trying to share data with us through feelings and sensations, and in refusing to pay attention, we numb ourselves to a key source of intelligence.

Our bodies are less prone to manipulation than our minds, and discipline practiced / exacted at the cost of the bodies is not only unsustainable, but dangerous. We are also more likely to falter in our discipline, often in pivotal moments, when it isn’t embodied, when our practice of it is at odds with our bodies.

SHIFT 3

FROM: Discipline as Building Compliance

TO: Discipline as Building Trust (for collective defiance)

Discipline is a neutral practice that can be wielded for good, evil, and everything in between.

Discipline as compliance means blindly following the rules in exchange for “safety”, power, and or another reward. Fascist regimes work to break trust, within ourselves and with each other, in order to create a vacuum for authoritarian powers to swoop in and fill that void of trust in exchange for compliance.

It’s no coincidence that in Daniel Hunter’s widely shared article “10 Ways To Be Prepared and Grounded Now That Trump Has Won” following Trump’s re-election in 2024, the first two strategies are 1) trust yourself and 2) find others you trust.

Under authoritarian regimes, discipline is an exercise in pacifying (i.e. they exert control over our behaviour to maintain a sense of “peace” and order).

Discipline as learning, however, invites us to ask questions, wrestle with our behaviours and the ideologies that inform them, and develop a conscious relationship with them.

In that, discipline can be a way to build trust with ourselves, a practice in which we follow through with what we commit to, where our actions align with our words and beliefs, consistently.

Discipline, within a group, relationship, or organizational context, can also be a way of building trust with each other. In the words of Safiya Bukhari, “The ability to trust your comrades implicitly and to know with certainty what they will do in any circumstance is the best security.”

In this sense, we know how a comrade will act, not because they’ve told us, but because they’ve shown us. Because we’ve been in the practice of discipline together, and they’ve been consistent in aligning their actions to their word.

Within movements for self-determination, discipline can be radicalizing (i.e. we become conscious of our unconscious tendencies so that we move with an awareness of our and the system’s fundamental tendencies).

This trust, built via discipline, is foundational in building up to the acts of collective defiance and collective disobedience that will ultimately dethrone and dismantle empire.

SHIFT 4

FROM: Discipline as Exerting Control

TO: Discipline as Exercising Agency

Within systems of domination, discipline is an exercise in control. When we feel oppressed by forces outside of ourselves, we may try to reclaim that control by exacting it on our own minds, bodies, and emotions in the name of discipline.

We are used to being in settings where rules are imposed upon us. What would it look like to choose the rules? If discipline is a practice of learning, what would it look like to choose the container and the content of what we learn and how we learn it.

Discipline doesn’t have to be a stripping of agency, as it is within carceral systems. Rather, it can be a focusing and directing of agency.

Relating to discipline as a choice vs. an obligation is also more sustainable. While obligation becomes tiring, agency can be energizing.

“I love rules, but not because they’re controlling. There are so many rules in our culture. Anything from how you build a space to what you can inject into your body is dictated by rules. And the only way that I think you can be free from external rules is to create your own personal set of rules that are even more rigid, but because they are your own, you feel like you’re completely free. So rules are actually a way of liberating oneself.”

- Natalie Tischler, @aredotna

SHIFT 5

FROM: Discipline as Individual Regimen

TO: Discipline as Collective Practice

Within cultures of individualism, so much of how we relate to discipline is isolating. Students are sent to the principal’s office to be disciplined, people are sent to jail to be disciplined, kids are sent to their rooms to be disciplined.

While most of us opt into the forms of compliance that keep the status quo in check (e.g. we stop at red lights, we wait for our turn in lines, we pay for what we take, etc.), when it comes to practices that support our collective liberation, we tend to practice discipline in isolation.

We may practice discipline in isolation because:

• we don’t trust ourselves to see it through and don’t want to fail with an audience,

• we don’t trust others to practice alongside us (i.e. fear of being shamed, punished, let down, etc.),

• it feels riskier to our own success to involve others (e.g. it takes more time to coordinate with others, accommodate others’ needs, etc.),

• we don’t want to be judged as “too much” or ostracized for our standards for discipline,

• we feel a sense of moral superiority in our practice that would need to dissolve if we were accompanied by others.

To be clear, self-discipline is necessary. We cannot cultivate or build with others what we are not also cultivating or building with and within ourselves.

Self-discipline, however, is not enough if the goal is collective liberation. A group of highly disciplined fighters moving in completely different directions based on their own understandings of discipline does not make a strong frontline.

What does it look like to engage with discipline as a relational practice? What does discipline look like in our relationships with each other?

Within systems that wield discipline as a tool of oppression, an active rewiring and reclaiming of our relationship to it is necessary if we are to be effective in our struggles for collective liberation.

More on the relationship between freedom and discipline in the next essay!

“For Boal, theater was not revolution, but it was a rehearsal for the revolution, meant to gather communities together in that rehearsal. Creative work readies us for material work, by offering a space to try out strategies, think through contradictions, remind us of our own agency.”

Fargo Tbakhi

Creative work and material work intersect in the body.

The body is the site of rehearsal, and the agent of revolution.

Sometimes the idea that creative work is the rehearsal becomes an excuse for not taking material action, to remain within the relatively safe space of rehearsal as our material conditions continue to worsen.

We say we are not ready for the big(ger) stage, we say we need more practice.

In truth, as much as rehearsal is practice, revolution is also a practice.

Rehearsal, done well, is a practice that changes us from within.

Revolution, as a practice, asks us to take action towards a world, a society, and systems that are coherent with those internal shifts.

It asks us to take tangible steps to align those internal shifts with our external realities. To resolve the sharpening contradictions between what rehearsal has taught us is possible within our bodies and what we are told is inevitable outside of them.

Each rehearsal should leave us more and differently ready for revolutionary action.

Each revolutionary action should leave us with deeper clarity around where more rehearsal is needed.

Doing more reps of the same exercise at the gym may leave us with stronger muscles, but if those muscles have never met any real adversity, it’s just an exercise in vanity.

Conversely, if we fight constantly without taking time to integrate what we’ve gleaned of our opponent’s strategies, strengths, and weaknesses and train our muscles to meet, match, and overpower their efforts, then we are fighting to fight, not fighting to win.

So, when do we know when to move from rehearsal to revolution and back again?

Our bodies.

Our bodies know.

There’s a restlessness that accompanies rehearsing without revolting (our bodies want to act), and a fatigue that accompanies revolt without rehearsal / refinement (our bodies want to integrate).

Creative work readies us for material work, and material work sharpens and clarifies our creative work.

These two forms of labor are intended to be symbiotic, mediated by the organism that is our individual and collective body.

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

“It was not because we advocated the use of the gun that the FBI considered the Black Panther Party a threat. It was because of the politics that guided the gun.”

Safiya Bukhari

Empire’s resistance to armed struggle on the part of the oppressed has never been about the guns.

It’s not about “violence” or “remaining peaceful” either.

Those are all propaganda talking points meant to cover up the actual point of contention.

Self-defense - as articulated by the Black Panther Party and many other armed resistance groups with popular support around the world - is less about the arms and more about the dignity it upholds.

It’s about self-defense as a practice that preserves dignity vs. one that is intended to incite violence.

Dignity is “our inherent value and worth as human beings; a sense of worthiness.”

Self-defense guided by dignity insists that our lives are worthy of protection, that our lives are worthy of being lived.

Self-defense guided by dignity is a commitment to and an insistence upon one’s inherent worth.

Empire, however, is built on the belief that some lives are worth more than others (i.e. supremacy).

In this sense, our insistence on dignity by any means necessary (i.e. armed struggle) is a direct threat to empire’s foundational logic.

Our insistence on dignity by any means necessary is an act of defiance.

Empires built on supremacy are shaken not by the guns themselves, but by the defiance they can enable in the hands of the oppressed.

Self-defense, as with most concepts with revolutionary roots, has been co-opted by empire.

Yet, the politics that guide the gun will always reveal its true intention.

There is the “self-defense” that acts to violate a peoples’ dignity, and the self-defense that acts to preserve a peoples’ dignity. We know the difference, and empire does too.

So let’s get it straight - it’s not and has never been about the guns, the violence, or “keeping the peace.”

It’s about the danger that our insistence on dignity poses to empire.

It’s about the existential threat that an intact sense of our inherent worth poses to supremacy.

Living within an imperialist state that has committed to doubling its defense spending by 2030, I refuse to believe that it’s the guns they have an issue with.

Dignity, on the other hand, that’s a danger worth fearing.

May we stay dangerous.

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

Each meditation unpacks a core skill that the DIA has chosen to practice and teach as a storytelling organization operating in this moment. Each core skill is essential to the worlds we are building towards, and poses an existential threat to the worlds we want to hospice.

The four core skills are: telling the truth, weaving the micro & the macro, holding & metabolizing contradictions, and practicing curiosity.

What is your relationship to curiosity?

In modern times, we understand curiosity to be a desire for knowledge, a desire to learn. An inquisitiveness.

And if you know me at all, you know I went looking for the etymology or origins of the word. What I found was revealing.

Curiosity comes from the Latin word curiositas, which means a desire for knowledge or inquisitiveness. But there’s more. Curiositas comes from the adjective curiosus, which means careful, attentive, or diligent.

And at the root of the word curiosus, lies the Latin noun cura, which means care, concern, or attention.

In other words, to return to the root of curiosity, is to return to care. In the words of David Gurteen,

“This linguistic lineage offers a hidden insight: the earliest form of curiosity was not simply about acquiring knowledge, but about caring enough to notice, inquire, and stay attentive….The word’s roots suggest that our impulse to understand the world springs from a fundamental act of connection and concern….When we are curious, we are not just seeking information but expressing care. We are reaching beyond ourselves to engage with something or someone.

“We ask questions because we care about the answers. We explore because we care about understanding. Whether we’re wondering how something works, what someone feels, or why the world is the way it is, curiosity always involves an act of attention and concern. This reframing invites us to think of curiosity not only as the beginning of knowledge but also as the beginning of connection. It’s a mode of caring that reconnects us with the world and each other. It reminds us that inquiry, at its best, is not cold detachment but warm engagement. We learn because we long to know, and we long to know because we care.”

What do we lose when we relate to curiosity only as a cognitive exercise?

What does it mean to return to a curiosity that has care at its core?

What does it mean to relate to curiosity as an act of love?

Not knowing is uncomfortable in a world that prizes knowing.

Not knowing can feel like a vulnerability in a world that rewards knowing.

In a world where curiosity is just about knowing, it’s hard to admit that we don’t know.

However, in a world where curiosity is an act of caring enough to pay attention, the admission is less that we don’t know and more that we want to know, that we care enough to know.

In her book, See No Stranger: A Manifesto for Revolutionary Love, author Valarie Kaur explores the role of wonder.

For her, wonder is a way of relating to the other through the lens of “You are a part of me I don’t yet know.” She learned this from her grandfather.

How does the essence of our curiosity change when it’s less about classifying a foreign person or idea or object, and more about understanding it/them as a part of us we do not yet know?

Valarie Kaur writes that,

“Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood – the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too – their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love.”

“…Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them.”

In a world where a Google Search can reveal a trail of information about most people, what does it mean to take the time to actually get to know someone?

In a world where algorithms are trained to feed us propaganda about entire groups of people, what does it mean to care enough to pay attention?

We often think of curiosity as a skill that is related to asking good questions.

Author Priya Parker says,

“A magical question invites story over opinion, which is so much more interesting and allows us to contain multitudes.”

In my view, opinion invites judgement and evaluation, whereas story invites understanding.

They ultimately activate different parts of one’s brain.

Opinions require justification, whereas stories require context.

The curiosity I’m inviting here is less about proving your opinions, yourself, or your worth.

Rather it’s more about unpacking and articulating the conditions, life experiences, and cultures in which these things - one’s opinion, sense of self, and worth - emerge.

A story, as a container, has more space for this exploration, more space for the embodiment of multitudes.

While curiosity is often associated with asking good questions, I think it also includes how we listen. In the words of Valarie Kaur,

“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling…I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious.”

Curiosity requires a baseline level of safety.

Do I feel safe enough to risk being changed by what this person has to tell me?

This safety includes safety with the other person, safety within the context that we’re in, and safety within one’s self.

What do we need to feel safe enough to stay curious?

As Kaur explains,

“The purpose of listening across lines of difference is not agreement or compromise. It is understanding. True understanding is not possible unless we risk changing our worldview. The question therefore is not whether or not to listen to our opponents. The questions are: When is it my role to listen? When am I emotionally and physically safe? When can I take on the labor of listening when others are not safe to do so?”

Curiosity, when expressed in ways that aren’t transactional, also asks us to notice how we are changed by what we hear, for better or for worse.

As Valarie Kaur writes,

“The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters…When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, “What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?” ...When I listen that deeply, it feels like a dance between two poles, between myself and another person, between what is at stake for them and what is at stake for me.”

And beyond safety and integration, I think building our curiosity also requires a high level of tolerance for being with what we don’t understand, what is unfamiliar, what is illegible to us.

For example, whether it’s trying to understand someone who is speaking in a different language, or even the practice of listening to more-than-human beings (i.e. the trees, the land, the ocean, the wind), so much of our comfort is contingent on being understood and being able to understand.

Especially when we inhabit identities where most things are designed to be understandable to us, it can be doubly frustrating when they aren’t.

The core tension at the heart of curiosity is that we develop the knowing from being with the not knowing.

We hone our understanding by staying with all that we don’t understand.

It is a labor that we do not have the capacity to extend to everyone all the time.

It is a labor that asks us to discern where and with whom we care enough to pay attention.

Where is your curiosity leading you?

REFLECTION PROMPTS

What is your relationship to practicing curiosity?

1. How does framing curiosity as “a desire for knowledge” vs. curiosity as “caring enough to pay attention” land in your body?

2. Under what circumstances have you been the most receptive to others’ curiosity towards you? What about them or the context made you more receptive?

3. When have you experienced the most resistance to others’ curiosity towards you? What about them or the context made you more receptive?

4. Who is the most curious person you know? What about them makes them so?

5. What do you need to feel safe enough to be curious?

6. When do you believe it is your role to listen?

7. When have you taken on the labor of listening when others haven’t been safe to do so?

8. In what contexts do you find it difficult to apply the frame of “you are a part of me I do not yet know” to another?

9. What’s your take on the statement, “A magical question invites story over opinion”?

10. Describe a moment when your curiosity served you well.

11. Describe a moment when your curiosity led you in a direction you wish you ultimately hadn’t followed.

12. When you meet new people, what tends to peak your curiosity? What are you most curious to know?

13. Describe a moment when your curiosity has been misinterpreted.

14. What are the barriers to, or risks of, practicing curiosity within the systems we live in?

15. If deep listening requires us to risk being changed by another, who are you willing and unwilling to be changed by?

16. Where has your curiosity been leading you lately?

This meditation and accompanying reflection prompts were written, and recorded, by Mathura Mahendren. If you intend to share or repeat any of the language or framing shared in these resources please credit Mathura Mahendren and the Department of Imaginary Affairs as the authors and direct your audiences back to this work. Thank you!

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

Each meditation unpacks a core skill that the DIA has chosen to practice and teach as a storytelling organization operating in this moment. Each core skill is essential to the worlds we are building towards, and poses an existential threat to the worlds we want to hospice.

The four core skills are: telling the truth, weaving the micro & the macro, holding & metabolizing contradictions, and practicing curiosity.

What is your relationship to holding and metabolizing contradictions?

Contradiction is defined as “the presence of ideas, beliefs, or aspects of a situation that are opposed to one another.” (adrienne maree brown)

In a letter that she wrote addressing immigrants and children of immigrants, therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli writes,

“You were raised on contradiction: Be humble, but make us proud. Blend in, but don’t forget where you came from. Succeed, but don’t draw too much attention. Be grateful, but don’t ask for more.”

In a colonized world, we are taught to contend with contradictions in two main ways.

One is through either/or thinking (i.e. if one of these things is true, the other cannot be). The other is through compartmentalization (i.e. if I have to hold both of these things, they can’t be in contact with one another, I have to keep them separate).

Essentially, in a colonized world, we are taught to respond to contradiction through erasure or division. Where either/or thinking is the erasure and compartmentalization is the division.

What if, instead, we approached contradictions with the intention of generating more possibilities? With the intention of expanding our capacity to hold what is, rather than shrinking what is to fit within our comfort, to fit within the system’s comfort?

We are taught to see contradictions as ‘complex,’ and we are taught to see complexity as a deterrent to engaging in something or with someone rather than as an invitation to explore. The phrase ‘It’s complex’ is used to shut down a conversation, rather than to open one.

At its root, the word ‘complex’ is the joining of the Latin prefix com- which means “with, together,” and plectere which means “to weave, braid, twine, entwine.” At its root, that which is complex is an invitation to weave and braid together.

In truth, contradictions cannot be resolved within the realities that generated them. The ideas or beliefs that are in opposition to each other, are in opposition partly because of the context we are operating within.

In that, the work of resolving contradictions demands a change. Something needs to shift, whether that’s a change in our perspective, or a shift in the reality within which we find ourselves. A shift in the conditions that created the contradictions in the first place.

For example, we may believe that our elected officials must have many years of experience in order to be able to do their jobs well.

We may also believe that they need to be someone who is responsive to the needs and voices of working class people.

However, if our reality is that all of the existing candidates who have years of experience are those who work against working class people, we have to sit in that tension. In order to resolve that tension, something needs to shift.

Maybe the shift is in our perspectives. Maybe we realize that, actually, it’s more important to us that our leaders are representatives of the people, and that we are willing to trust someone who is newer to politics to build their experience as they go.

Or maybe we go the other way. Maybe we decide that experience matters more and we are willing to take a risk on someone who is more experienced, but has a track record of prioritizing corporate interests.

Or maybe, instead of shifting our perspective, we shift our reality instead. Maybe we come together to actively seek out and run a candidate that is both experienced and prioritizes the needs of everyday people.

In this way, contradiction reminds us of how much we value coherence. It reminds us of how much we value alignment.

It asks us to shift ourselves and our realities towards more coherence, towards more alignment.

What if we could see contradictions not as constraints, but as catalysts?

What if the discomfort that they generate is a test of how much incoherence and misalignment we are actually willing to tolerate before we make a change?

This is the work of movements. The work of movements is the work of shifting perspectives and shifting realities.

In this sense, contradictions can power movements. In the words of German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

Contradictions can keep us sharp, alert, and discerning - all of which are threats to systems that are dependent on us remaining blissfully ignorant and complicit.

We are seeing this tension in this moment. In the words of the Palestinian Youth Movement,

“We are in a moment of sharpened contradictions…The sharpening of contradictions in revolutionary theory refers to moments where the nature of opposing views, ideologies, and/or material forces becomes readily apparent to everyone. The sharpening of contradictions forces humans and often classes of people to recognize the systemic character of the oppression or exploitation facing them or their fellow humans and the role different people, forces, and ideas play in that system.”

In the words of adrienne maree brown,

“Movements are often tense with the contradiction between what we believe and are fighting for and what we feel we must practice to navigate current conditions.”

For example, we may believe in abolition but we may still call for the arrest of those who hurt us because we want to remain safe in our current realities. We want to hold them accountable in our current realities. That is a contradiction that we hold.

Within a colonized world, we are taught to pathologize this tension that contradictions create. But, at its root, ‘tension’ means “to be stretched tight.”

Like an elastic band that is stretched tight, contradiction and the tension it generates within movements and organizations can actually push our boundaries, and the bounds of what we believe is possible.

In that stretching, we may widen our capacity to hold oppositional truths, we may contract in response to the exertion, and/or we may build so much pressure within the system that the boundaries that once held us can no longer sustainably contain us and eventually burst.

In this moment, I see us widening and contracting, both as individuals and as a collective. And while the burst is yet to come, I think in some ways, we are already bursting.

There are boundaries, rules, and norms that may have contained us five years ago, two years ago, or even six months ago that no longer do. We’re making decisions differently. What we value is changing, even if slowly.

There are ways in which we have already been split open under the pressure of sharpening contradictions, both as individuals and as a collective.

Our bodies are capable of holding contradictions.

Our bodies are capable of holding the ‘both/and’, as well as the ‘beyond’ that can emerge when oppositional truths are braided together.

Our bodies are capable of widening, contracting, and eventually bursting through boundaries in the labor of bringing forth new life and new worlds.

In fact, it is the most natural thing they do, and it is why we are here.

What are the contradictions you are holding?

What are the contradictions you are ready to metabolize?

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

What is your relationship to holding and metabolizing contradictions?

1. What are the contradictions you grew up with?

2. How did those around you react / respond to contradictions when you were growing up?

3. What is a contradiction that you’ve carried within you for most of your life? How, if at all, has your relationship to it changed over the years?

4. How does your body react when it encounters a contradiction?

5. What is a contradiction you’ve been able to metabolize? What was your process of moving through it?

6. What is something that most people see as a contradiction, but actually doesn’t feel like one to you?

7. What is your relationship to either/or thinking? How has it served you? Where has it cost you?

8. What is your relationship to compartmentalization? How has it served you? Where has it cost you?

9. Who is someone that you experience as being able to hold and metabolize contradictions well? What about who they are or how they move allows them to do so?

10. Have you experienced any of the following contradictions? (“Be humble, but make us proud; Blend in, but don’t forget where you came from; Succeed, but don’t draw too much attention; Be grateful, but don’t ask for more.”) If so, how have they impacted you?

11. How does the statement “What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive” land for you?

12. (When) have you experienced someone say “It’s complex” as a way of shutting down a conversation? What do you think informs that response?

13. If you are someone who has had the experience of birthing a human / a project / an organization, how do you experience the parallels between metabolizing contradictions and giving birth?

14. What do you need in order to hold and/or metabolize contradictions? What care, support, resources, etc. do you need?

15. What are the contradictions that you are holding that feel ripe and ready for metabolization?

This meditation and accompanying reflection prompts were written, and recorded, by Mathura Mahendren. If you intend to share or repeat any of the language or framing shared in these resources please credit Mathura Mahendren and the Department of Imaginary Affairs as the authors and direct your audiences back to this work. Thank you!

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

Each meditation unpacks a core skill that the DIA has chosen to practice and teach as a storytelling organization operating in this moment. Each core skill is essential to the worlds we are building towards, and poses an existential threat to the worlds we want to hospice.

The four core skills are: telling the truth, weaving the micro & the macro, holding & metabolizing contradictions, and practicing curiosity.

What is your relationship to weaving the micro and the macro?

By definition, micro means small and macro means large. What does it mean to weave the small and the large?

If we’re thinking about distance, the micro might refer to the people that are closest to us, the places that we visit frequently, the activities that make up our day-to-day, the challenges that feel close to home, and/or the issues that feel close to our hearts.

If we’re thinking about distance, the macro might refer to the people, contexts, and/or issues that feel farther away - geographically, socially, or emotionally.

While it can be easy to see them as separate, the micro and the macro are deeply intertwined and evolving together.

In a world where we are waking up to crisis after crisis, the prospect of weaving our day-to-day experiences with the larger context that is shaping them can feel overwhelming. In a moment where we are constantly responding to attacks on humanity, it can feel overwhelming to try and weave the threads between different crises, much less connect each one back to our own lives.

It’s not hard because this weaving is unnatural. In fact, making sense through making connections is part of what makes us human. We are relational beings.

When we don’t make connections, when we don’t feel connected to something, we are at higher risk of abandoning it or turning against it.

The reason that weaving the micro and the macro can feel hard is because this weaving is actively discouraged and disincentivized by the powers that be.

Within a culture of individualism, we are told to mind our own business, to focus only on what we need or want, and to avoid connecting what’s happening “out there” with what’s happening “in here.”

Within a culture of capitalism, happiness requires money, and money requires our time, and when our time is money, there is no time for the unpaid work of weaving.

In a time of polycrises, it can really feel like we are playing a game of Whack-a-Mole, both in the micro and the macro.

Whether it be in our day-to-day lives or more broadly in the world, it can feel like just as one fire is being put out, another starts raging. We only have enough time and energy to put out one fire at a time, but not enough to examine what continues to cause these fires, not enough to figure out how we might prevent them.

This constant firefighting plunges us deeper into individualism, where we have less and less capacity to see or tend to anything outside of our own lives.

It’s a loop that reinforces a binary between micro and macro, a binary between “in here” and “out there”, a binary between what affects me and what doesn’t.

And whenever we are presented with a binary, we are told we have to choose one over the other. And we do.

We may choose to zero in on our own bubble and focus on getting through the day-to-day activities of our lives while turning away from the raging fires outside our windows.

Or, we may choose to abandon our day-to-day commitments in order to tend to a larger cause.

Both choices ask us to compartmentalize as a way of justifying our decision.

While this compartmentalization might be convenient in the short-term, we are not isolated beings.

We are impacted both by our individual circumstances and the broader context, and when push comes to shove, the choice to compartmentalize ultimately disintegrates us.

By disintegration, I mean dis-integrates - a lack of integrity, we become unwhole. In this state of disintegrity, of unwholeness, we are more vulnerable.

In order to integrate the poles of a binary, we have to center the relationship between them. In her book emergent strategy, author adrienne maree brown uses the concept of fractals to describe the relationship between the small and the large. She says,

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale…what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale… what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

She goes on to cite Grace Lee Boggs’ quote, “Transform yourself to transform the world”, but cautions that,

“This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the Planet.”

We see a similar sentiment echoed by author Dr. Ayesha Khan in her article You Don’t Need to “Fill Your Cup First” to Seek or Be in Community. She invites us to consider how other life forms “fill their cup.” She says,

“Just like plants, it is impossible for us to truly care for ourselves.

The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breath, the soap we cleanse ourselves with, the clothes we wear, every single thing we rely on for survival came to be as a result of the unquantifiable labor, time & energy poured in by other beings and the land. Each thing we use to survive comes from somewhere, even if we don’t acknowledge those contributions or reciprocate…”

“...Nothing in nature is self-sufficient. Plants don’t do “self-care.” No living being can “fill its own cup.” You and I are not different - we, humans, are part of nature. We need connection with the outside world when we’re at our lowest, not more “alone time.” Often, mainstream ideas of “self-care” prolong distress, isolation, and loneliness. “Self-care” & rest in isolation cannot truly, sustainably regenerate and recharge us. Seeking connection and trying to anchor in the collective struggle for liberation can. It’s hard to motivate ourselves to find each other when we’re all exhausted and operating from a place of scarcity. But to heal the magnitude of planetary destruction that colonialism / capitalism have unleashed, we have to try to connect, build, and seek and give as much / whenever we can. The only way we can restore a severely depleted, imbalanced ecosystem is with excess abundance drawn from the collective.” - Dr. Ayesha Khan, You Don’t Need to “Fill Your Cup First” to Seek or Be in Community.

One of the principles of emergent strategy is “small is good, small is all - the large is a reflection of the small.”

I want to complicate that for a moment.

While I do believe that small is good, I think small is only effective when it is aligned with our vision for the large.

When we become so preoccupied with or attached to our individual everyday actions that we forget to zoom out, we might find that over time our intentions might not actually match our desired impact.

For example, boycotting products and services from states or companies that are invested in genocide is a micro action that has the potential to impact the macro goal of divesting from genocide.

However, our individual boycotts are significantly more effective when they are directed en masse toward collectively agreed upon targets.

While we as a household might feel good or even morally superior about boycotting everything that comes out of Israel or the United Arab Emirates, our actions could actually be more powerful if we enlisted more households within our communities, our neighborhoods, and our families, and collectively boycotted the most impactful targets (as identified by the central boycott committees in support of Palestine and Sudan respectively).

Similarly, if we want to see more unity in our world, our everyday actions need to be more unified - weaving migrant rights movements with labor movements, weaving food security campaigns with movements for indigenous sovereignty, and weaving of environmental protection efforts with demilitarization campaigns.

Weaving our micro actions with our vision for the macro, and building unity across our micro actions can also guard against the existential crisis and defeatism that we are prone to when it feels like the world is going to shit.

Yes, the large is a reflection of the small, but small doesn’t have to mean individual.

Small doesn’t have to mean alone.

Collective weaving means that we are less prone to blaming ourselves for the state of the world.

It means that we are more clear about who our opponents actually are (vs. spending our time attacking ourselves or each other).

Collective weaving allows us to be personally invested without feeling personally attacked.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, author Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the process of braiding sweetgrass as an activity that requires one person to hold the braid while another is doing the braiding.

The weaving that I’m talking about here is similar.

The practice of weaving the micro and the macro, while natural, requires dedicated time, space, and energy in a world that actively discourages it.

We need spaces that can hold us as we weave.

We need people that can hold us as we weave.

Weaving also doesn’t look the same in each moment. If we think about the process of braiding threads, each thread alternates between being at the front and being at the back. Similarly, there will be days in our weaving practice when we will have to foreground the micro, and others when it will be more important to center the macro.

What’s crucial to remember is that this processing of alternating threads is not a weakness. This process of weaving and braiding is not a weakness. It is a choice that actually reinforces each thread, making it stronger and able to withstand more tension than if it was on its own.

What are you ready to weave?

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

What is your relationship to weaving the micro and the macro?

1. Within the context of your own life, what would you categorize as being a part of the “micro”?

2. Within the context of your own life, what feels like it’s a part of the “macro”?

3. In what ways do you see what is playing out in the world reflected in your interpersonal relationships and vice versa?

4. When, if at all, has the work of trying to weave the micro and the macro left you more depleted? What factors do you think contributed to your experience?

5. When, if at all, has the work of trying to weave the micro and the macro left you more energized? What factors do you think contributed to your experience?

6. How have others responded to you trying to weave the micro and the macro?

7. When was a time when you prioritized the micro over the macro? What was the intelligence behind that choice? What, if anything, did it cost you?

8. When was a time when you prioritized the macro over the micro? What was the intelligence behind that choice? What, if anything, did it cost you?

9. How does “Small is good. Small is all. The large is a reflection of the small.” land in your body? What if any disagreement do you encounter re: this statement, either within yourself or from others?

10. How does “Transform yourself to transform the world” land in your body? What if any disagreement do you encounter re: this statement, either within yourself or from others?

11. How does “you don’t have to “fill your cup first” to seek and be in community” land in your body? What if any disagreement do you encounter re: this statement, either within yourself or from others?

12. Who in your life / circles do you experience as someone who effectively weaves the micro and the macro in how they think and move? How have you seen them do this?

13. What are the most powerful examples of weaving the micro and the macro that you’ve seen? What about them makes them so effective?

14. What aspects of your life, if any, feel like they are ready for deeper weaving?

This meditation and accompanying reflection prompts were written, and recorded, by Mathura Mahendren. If you intend to share or repeat any of the language or framing shared in these resources please credit Mathura Mahendren and the Department of Imaginary Affairs as the authors and direct your audiences back to this work. Thank you!

The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com

Each meditation unpacks a core skill that the DIA has chosen to practice and teach as a storytelling organization operating in this moment. Each core skill is essential to the worlds we are building towards, and poses an existential threat to the worlds we want to hospice.

The four core skills are: telling the truth, weaving the micro & the macro, holding & metabolizing contradictions, and practicing curiosity.

—

What is your relationship to telling the truth?

We start with this skill - the ability to tell the truth - because it grounds us in our current reality. In the simplest terms, the truth is the answer to the question: What is real for you in this moment?

The question itself acknowledges that what is real for you might not be the same as what is real for another. The truth, like all life, manifests uniquely in each of us.

The question also acknowledges that what is real for you in this moment may not be the same in a different moment. The truth, like all life, is subject to change.

What is real for you in this moment?

Nowhere in this question is there a moral judgement.

Growing up, we are often taught to tell the truth because it’s “the right thing to do.”

Within social justice circles, advocacy circles, we often appeal to those in power to tell the truth, to act on the truth, because it’s the right thing to do.

I actually think there’s a much more compelling reason to tell the truth.

I think we tell the truth because it’s liberating, because it returns us to wholeness and integrity within systems that constantly try to sever us from ourselves and each other.

Telling the truth requires us to integrate, while lying asks us to compartmentalize.

We cannot move toward freedom from an unfree place. We need to be able to access freedom somewhere, even if it’s initially only within our own mind, body, and spirit.

We need to be able to access freedom somewhere in order to move towards freedom outside of us.

I think being able to tell ourselves the truth - to acknowledge to ourselves what is real for us in this moment - is a practice of accessing freedom within our own beings.

In the words of Black revolutionary Assata Shakur,

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”

To become free, we have to tell ourselves the truth.

In her book, all about love, author bell hooks comments on how widespread lying has become in our culture. She says,

“More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling. Such a commitment is difficult when lying is deemed more acceptable than telling the truth. Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth…To be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”

I think it’s a myth that telling the truth always or only feels good.

Telling the truth requires us, and then allows us, to feel more vs feel better.1

At the same time, author bell hooks, in a different text called Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, distinguishes between two kinds of truth-telling.

One being “the harsh critiques we give one another, which may contain “truth” content” and the other being “liberating truth-telling.”

She says that they are not the same.

The first, while open and honest, is intended “to assert power over another person and hence use the practice of truth-telling to assault someone else’s psyche,” whereas the second is healing.

hooks talks about the ways in which racialized parents, conditioned through their own histories and realities of racial apartheid, anticipate how the white world may disparage and ridicule their children, and try to “protect” their children by critiquing and policing them themselves so they might change their behaviors to be safer in a white-dominated world.

This is one of the ways in which truth-telling can be both a liberatory practice, and a tool of oppression when wielded without awareness.

In a hostile world, when have we wielded the truth as a weapon against our own, under the guise of protecting them?

This brings us back to the questions of why we are telling the truth and whose recognition we are ultimately seeking.

While most people will say they appreciate honesty, we live within systems that equate “authenticity” with just enough vulnerability to taste connection, but not enough to challenge or change our composition.

Does the truth only hold weight when it is acknowledged and accepted by the powers that be?

Is something still true if it’s not known by others? Is a truth still true without recognition?

If a truth is recognized by the powers that be, but ultimately doesn’t feel liberating in our bodies, is it still our truth?

Is a truth still a truth if we keep it to ourselves? When we share our truths, whose recognition are we seeking? Whose recognition do we want? Whose recognition do we need? Why?

How do we know when a truth is ready to be shared? How does your body let you know?

What is the risk of telling people a truth that they are not ready to hear? How do we prepare bodies - others’ bodies - to receive the truths that our bodies are ready to share?

What does it mean to tell the truth when the truth is not enough?

The truth may not always lead to justice, but justice cannot be accessed without the truth.

The truth may not always lead to reconciliation, but reconciliation cannot happen without the truth.

The truth may not always lead to love, but love - true love - cannot be accessed without the truth.

While our truths may be our individual responses to the question: what is real for you in this moment?, the practice of sharing these individual truths shapes our collective reality.

When do we have a responsibility to share our truths out loud as a part of this collective sense-making, and when is it okay to keep our truths to ourselves?

How will we know?

What is real for you in this moment?

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

What is your relationship to telling the truth?

1. What is real for you in this moment?

2. What does truth feel like in your body? How do you know when you are in the presence of truth? How does your body respond to truth?

3. What is your earliest memory of lying?

4. What are the lies you grew up being told or telling yourself?

5. What are the lies, if any, you have to tell or perpetuate in order to do your job?

6. What are the lies, if any, you have to tell or perpetuate in order to maintain your relationships?

7. Who is the most honest person you know? Why?

8. Which is the most honest relationship in your life? Why?

9. What are the core truths that guide your life?

10. What, if anything, do you believe is indisputable?

11. How have people responded to you speaking your truth?

12. What truths have been the hardest for you to reconcile in this season of your life?

13. What has been the hardest truth to name/own/share in your life at large? What have you gained from naming it? What have you lost from naming it?

14. What experiences, if any, have you had at the intersection of truth and freedom?

15. What experiences, if any, have you had at the intersection of truth and love?

16. When have you told a truth that wasn’t enough and/or didn’t lead you to the outcome you wanted? Was it still worth telling?

17. What are the everyday lies that you tell for the sake of convenience, safety, and/or belonging?

18. In what ways (explicit/implicit, subtle/obvious) has lying become a norm within our culture?

This meditation and accompanying reflection prompts were written, and recorded, by Mathura Mahendren. If you intend to share or repeat any of the language or framing shared in these resources please credit Mathura Mahendren and the Department of Imaginary Affairs as the authors and direct your audiences back to this work. Thank you!

“Someone asked her why people should support Mumia and other political prisoners. Safiya [Bukhari] said, ‘anyone who is truly passionate about social justice has the capacity to become a political prisoner.’”

- Laura Whitehorn

“Safiya [Bukhari] found it frustrating and ironic, as I do, that there is so much interest in the 1960s and the years of revolutionary movement, but so little interest in the plight of political prisoners who were among the revolutionaries of those years.”

- Laura Whitehorn

—

We glorify revolutionaries, and abandon political prisoners.

They are one in the same - revolutionaries and political prisoners.

Glorification and abandonment are different phases of the same cycle. The former sets us up for the latter.

We glorify their actions, and then abandon them when they face the consequences of those actions.

We celebrate the ways in which their actions serve and galvanize the collective, yet can somehow reconcile that the consequences of those actions are individual, for them to shoulder alone.

I’ve written in a previous essay that glorification, however well-intentioned, is a form of dehumanization.1

There is a distancing that happens between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the process of glorifying.

We admire their courage and steadfastness as something that is innate and unique to them, rather than recognizing it as a quality that is borne out of necessity, emerging from the will to survive within systems determined to erase one’s existence.

Glorifying their struggle absolves us of our responsibility in ending the conditions that catapulted them into a herohood for which they did not ask.

In some ways, it is the equivalent of celebrating healthcare workers as heroes during a global pandemic, while simultaneously refusing to take the necessary precautions to ensure that we are not exacerbating the conditions that forced them into a situation that they would not choose for themselves.

What Safiya invokes in her rationale for supporting political prisoners is the opposite of glorification.

It is an invitation to bridge the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that glorification exacerbates.

It is an invitation to see us in them, and them in us. To see that if we too are truly committed to collective liberation in the ways that we say and think we are, we too have the capacity to become political prisoners.

She asks us to fight for them, to support them, as we would want someone to show up for us, because we understand - in an embodied way - that the only things separating our realities are luck, privilege, and a lived and unrelenting commitment to our collective liberation.

As former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn describes,

“When you’re inside, it means everything to know that there’s someone who will care when you get thrown in the hole or when you don’t have money in your commissary account - someone who will call people to help. Safiya was one of the people prisoners counted on...In years when radical movements are in disarray or when activism is absent, work in support of political prisoners can be a way to keep some political issues alive. For prisoners, though, it is more than a tactic - it is a lifeline. That is why every current and former US-held leftist political prisoner knows and reveres the names of Yuri and Safiya in particular. Their work made it possible for political prisoners to have a voice, which meant we were still politically active human beings.”

Abolishing the cages does not mean abandoning those resisting within them.

The cage is a site of struggle, perhaps the one with the most proximate, intimate, and regular interaction with the carceral state.

Who benefits when we abandon those who are the most learned and experienced in surviving the worst of the police state?

The movement to free political prisoners is indeed a lifeline for those in the cages, and do we see how they are also a lifeline for us?

An umbilical cord into the belly of the beast.

“It’s not good enough to say, “We agree to disagree.” That usually means that you’ve decided to go your separate ways and not interfere with each other…There is no separate way in a revolutionary struggle.”

Safiya Bukhari

—

What does it take to walk the same path together when we don’t agree with each other?

What is the cost of “agreeing to disagree”? What is the cost of saying that we’re walking the same path when we are actually not?

Disagreement can be productive.

Disagreement can sharpen us.1

It is the denial of disagreement, the denial of misalignment, that is destructive.

Disagreement is easier to move through when there is safety.

In Safiya Bukhari’s words,

“Individual and organizational safety and well-being begin with the knowledge of what you’re about, what your organization is about, your limitations, the organization’s limitations, your strengths, and the organization’s strengths. Knowledge is the key to security. History has shown that the best security depends upon the internal strength of the organization and the internal principles of the people who make up the organization.”

I think a part of why disagreement feels so threatening is because it tests and/or asks us to reveal who we are and what we are about.

To say “I’m not about this,” and still remain in relationship, we have to reveal what we are about and why.

Some see the work of resolving the contradictions among us as a distraction from the work of revolution.

We say, “I’m here to do the work, I don’t want to get caught up in the interpersonal drama.”

The thing is, revolution is dramatic, and moving through these interpersonal tensions is part of the work.

By definition, revolution is a radical change in the established order. A radical change gets to the root, and uprooting what is established is dramatic.

When wrestling with the contradictions among us, we may feel morally superior when we choose our principles over people.

Principles refer to the moral rules or strong beliefs that influence our actions.

Principles don’t fight back, principles don’t trigger us, principles don’t say one thing and do another. People do.

Principles also don’t check in to make sure we got home safe, they don’t bring us food when we’re unwell, and they don’t ask about our loved ones. People do.

We often cling to the supposed certainty of our principles when people or the world introduce uncertainty into our lives.

And while principles can be an important grounding force for our work, they are not a replacement for people or relationships.

In fact, principles vs. people is a false binary.

Our principles shape how we relate to people, and the people around us shape our principles. Our principles remain ideas until they are practiced and tested in our relationships with people.

Echoing the words of Professor Dylan Rodríguez, uncertainty can be a generative force for our movements:

“Uncertainty - the beauty [of it], not just the thrill, but the beauty, the productivity, the creativity of the unfathomable, of the uncertain - that shit is dangerous in the best way.

It’s dangerous because, in some foundational ways, it makes us question who we are, what we’re doing and where we’re at. It questions the very premise and the legitimacy and the existence of civilization.”

When we say we are going to go our separate ways in the context of revolution, we are relating to revolution as a destination to which we can each take different routes.

In truth, revolution is the practice and the path that we shape together.

There is no separate way in revolution because the way IS the work. The way IS the revolution.

This is why, even though they may share some common principles, no two revolutions are the same. The people who made the way, the contradictions among them, and how they resolved them, were distinct.

Resolving the contradictions among us is the work of revolution.2

The uncertainty that surrounds this work is the birthplace of our truest and most dangerous [to the established order] selves.

Who are we when we don’t know?

Who and what do we trust when we are not sure?

Who benefits when we see certainty as safety? Safe for whom?

Resolving the contradictions among us is the work of revolution.

Denying the contradictions among us is the work of counterinsurgency.

If revolution is death [to the established order] by a thousand cuts, then counterinsurgency is death [to our collective potential] by a thousand denials.

To love is to will another’s existence.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

Revolution is the way that is born of willing our collective, contradictory existence.

I cried.

And kept on getting up.

A little slower.

And a lot more deadly.”

Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron, wrote these words in reference to losing her close friend, comrade, and fellow Black Liberation Army member, Zayd Shakur. Zayd was killed by a New Jersey state trooper.

“You died.

I cried.

And kept on getting up.

A little slower.

And a lot more deadly.”

I first read these words last year in Assata’s autobiography, and they have since resurfaced with her passing on September 25, 2025. I’ve been playing them over and over in my being, especially those last two lines: “A little slower, and a lot more deadly.”

What does it mean to be more deadly? And how is that deadliness connected to the grief we experience in the face of loss?

Deadly means “causing or capable of causing death.”

In this context, I read it as becoming more deadly to the oppressive systems in which we live, more deadly to the systems that precipitate these deaths.

If love is “willing someone’s existence,”1 loss reminds us that sometimes our will alone is not enough.

Loss reminds us of our limits, yes, but how does that make us more deadly?

There’s something that happens when we survive loss, when our worst fears come true. On the other side of grief, there is a particular kind of freedom - however uninvited - that is unlocked. It’s the freedom of having nothing (or at least less) to lose.

When we have less to lose, less to protect, less to fear, we are able to move from a defensive stance to an offensive stance in a way that can be deadlier to the system.

This is not to say that all of us should now go out and lose everything we hold dear for the sake of unlocking this freedom, this power, this deadliness.

It’s to say that just as there is power in willing someone’s existence (i.e. love), there is also power that can be unlocked when we encounter the limits of that will (i.e. loss).

It’s the version of “I have no more fucks to give” that is rooted in a readiness to abandon the performance of one reality in exchange for another that feels more true vs. a statement that is rooted in defeatism or nihilism. The former is a boundary that emerges from reckoning with one’s reality, while the latter is a hall pass for inertia.

When we encounter unimaginable loss, our worlds shatter - break down and blast open - in ways that no visualizing exercise in a visioning workshop could ever facilitate. This level of disruption is disorganizing, for better and for worse.

Our entire composition is re-arranged, from the shock, shrapnel, and sustained absence of what once was. Equally, there is something about having no fucks left to give and hitting rock bottom that can blast open the bounds of our pre-loss imagination. When something we never imagined happens, when we survive (even if barely) what we believed would be an unsurvivable loss, our embodied understanding of what is possible shifts.

It is in the context of this disorganization that grief courses through our vessel.

It can be painful because, as it forges a path and a place for itself within our bodies, grief both bears witness to all that was displaced and adds to the disorganization.

Once it has established its headquarters, grief begins the process of taking apart everything that our loss has touched so that it may put them back together in a way that leaves us feeling more whole and more integrated in our post-loss reality.

We often summon our imagination in the pursuit of creating futures, yet what we forget is that it can also be an integrative tool that weaves our past, present, and future.

If imagination is “the ability to form a picture in your mind of something that you have not seen or experienced,” grief feeds all that was displaced and all that it meant to us into our imagination so that it might show us a future(s) that honours what was, what is no longer, and what will always be.

Grief, if we are really listening, also demands an orientation to the collective.

If our efforts to will someone’s/something’s existence were not enough to keep them/it alive, we can either sink into a story of personal inadequacy, or rise - slower but deadlier - with the conviction to build more will, collective will, to keep their/its legacy alive.

Adjacent to the orientation of personal inadequacy, is the orientation of guilt - often survivor’s guilt.

Death-making systems condition us to relate to the experience living after loss as a relationship of guilt. We are conditioned to feel guilty for living.

We are conditioned to feel as though our living is wrong. That we are not worthy of living.

In many ways, this battle with guilt becomes more about us than it is about who or what we lost. It plunges us into isolation, perpetual unworthiness, and perpetual wrongness.

Life-affirming systems condition us to relate to the experience of living after loss as an honouring of, a responsibility to, and an extension of the life that has been lost.

Our living is an honour, a responsibility, and a dedication to who and what we’ve lost. It centers our relationship to that which we’ve lost and it makes our living about something much bigger than us.

And when we dedicate our being and our doing to something bigger than ourselves, our capacity expands.

In this expansion, we may take longer to move because:

• we are no longer acting solely on our behalf, but also in honour of those who are no longer in this realm.

• we must find different ways of connecting with those who are no longer physically present.

• we are discerning which of our inheritances from them we want to carry forth vs. leave behind.

• our loss - no matter how big or small it may be relative to other/others’ losses - is always the worst and most present loss, until we’ve integrated it.

So yes, we may be slower, but that slowness, when focused and intentional, can sharpen us.

This sharpening means our resistance becomes less what we do for our own survival, and more what we owe to the legacy of our beloveds, our martyrs, to those and that which came before us.

We are less caught up in existential crises about our own worthiness or lack thereof, or moral crises about our rightness and our wrongness (both battlegrounds well constructed and reinforced by dominant systems), and more focused on carrying forth a lineage of resistance that preceded us and will succeed us.

Grief teaches us that the labor of willing someone’s or something’s existence - the labor of love - extends well beyond (and before) their physical existence.

In the words of poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib:

“I think grief treats me best when I’m channeling the people I’ve lost through my current living… That’s the real gift, to say that I am not just one person, I am multiple versions of a person and some of those versions of myself have been loved immensely by people who were so incredible that, through their loving of me, I have a richer texture and that texture allows me to navigate the world in ways that I am on my own not equipped to do. And that means that on my best days, I get through the world, I get through the challenges of living, navigated gently by a whole host of people who, even without them knowing it, have created a generous blueprint through which I’ve learned to maneuver this life well. And that is the richest praise I can give one’s living - that it echoes repeatedly through my survival.”

The gulf between the realization of our biggest fear(s) and the unlocking of our deepest capacity is bridged by our commitment to meeting and metabolizing our grief, re-membering its orientation to collectivity, and dedicating our living to those we have lost.

In the words of writer and activist Malkia Devich-Cyril,

“When we bring our fights to the watering hole of grief, our political systems, natural environment, economic frameworks, civil society, and culture all become living breathing memorials to what we have lost. What we have lost becomes found, witnessed, honored. In this way, all social justice and human rights work is a collective act of glorified mourning.”

In the face of Zayd’s death, Assata metabolized her loss into her chosen name, her resistance, and her living - a little slower and a lot more deadly.

“I thought about what Zayd had always told me. “While you’re alive, girl, you betta live.”

“I am about life,” i said to myself. “I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born. I’m going to live and i’m going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that union, i’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and i believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.” I was ready for whatever happened. I relaxed and let nature take its course.””

“My new name had to mean something really special to me. At the time, there were little pamphlets being put out listing names and their meanings, but i had a hard time finding one i liked. A lot of the names had to do with flowers or songs or birds or other things like that. Others meant born on Thursday, faithful, loyal, or even things like tears, or little fool, or one who giggles. The women’s names were nothing like the men’s names, which meant things like strong, warrior, man of iron, brave, etc. I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the liberation of our people. I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means “she who struggles,” Olugbala means “Love for the people,” and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful.””

WORDS OF CAUTION

We must be mindful of our tendency, within these systems, to glorify, pedestal, and/or individualize those who have endured unimaginable loss.2

Those who have lost more are not inherently better people, or “so strong” or “resilient” for enduring what they have endured. And they most definitely aren’t “lucky” to have the freedom that comes with having little to lose and everything to gain.