On Theft and Reclamation
How do you feel when you observe the dominant structures of authority and governance in the world?
Need I ask how you’re feeling as you observe the megalomania of global terrorism being rained down on the people of Palestine in complicit support of settler colonialism (and big profits from the industry of war)?
Fire and brimstone in response to organic enactments of traumatized rage at not only the theft of land and home, but to decades of strategic dehumanizing and genocidal ethnic cleansing.
Settler colonialism cannot continue to deny the (ongoing) Nakba anymore than anti-semites can deny the Holocaust.
For me, the connective thread that weaves through all dominant colonial systems - from full frontal genocide and the military + medical industrial complexes, to life-force draining systems of bureaucracy and finance, and the corporatist, fear-driven mono-narratives of legacy media - to name just a few, is the gaping absence of soul.
I feel this through the chest-tightening confusion that permeates the rage, the grief, the hope and the love. (This was gorgeously echoed back to me in a recent group somatic weaving session with the brave + visionary souls in Root + Rise.
Profound confusion - felt intensely by a global human family, beings with souls - regardless of which 'side' they happen to be on - looking on in horror at the relentless acts of soulless terror being waged on other humans.
What I see and feel is a world dominated by the authoritarianism of abject soullessness, of systems built on the absence of the essential quality of being: the soul.
What I see and feel is a world dominated by entities that decree that the human soul is damned and inherently sinful; by a narrative where “redemption” can only be arrived at through the joyless (soulless) martyrdom of struggle, suffering and sacrifice.
Could it be that these (soulless?) entities have never experienced and are therefore afraid of the native beauty of the soul? Of the wild + rooted power of its inherent innocence, creativity and magnificence?
And/or could it be that these entities - which have a very similar flavor to the ancient Greek and Gnostic archetype of the archons, and the asuras from Indian mythology - are emanations of a state of consciousness that are stuck in and looping on feeding off the energy of suffering, struggle and destruction, arising from the theft and degradation of soul, body and land?
Our souls are not inherently sinful, we didn’t fall from grace and come here to suffer (and inflict suffering) in order to be redeemed.
Our souls don’t need redeeming at all. They require reclaiming and liberating - much like stolen soil and land.
The theft and loss of soul eventually becomes a chronic call. If we can feel and sense this, our response can begin with cultivating safety, courage and resilience, from the inside out, as we embark on the reclamation of our individual, ineffable souls from systemic narratives that tell us we’re worthless, meaningless and damned. Narratives that have, for millennia, been feeding off the legacy of collective trauma birthed by these lies.
As we reclaim and embody our individual souls, the ways in which we live and act and offer our energy to the people and places in the world who are being literally devoured in this feeding frenzy of suffering becomes rooted in something far greater than our own trauma responses, far greater than performative savior complexes or numbed out disassociation.
Through the reclamation of our own souls, we’re irrevocably resourced to participate in the restoration of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul.
This individual reclamation organically, spontaneously creates the waves and ripples of an evolution in collective consciousness, into which these entities, these hungry ghosts, absorb and dissolve into new cycles of evolution.
Warring and suffering can make way for an organic evolution, where obsolete states of consciousness and their expiring timelines naturally fall away. This is just the way things are can be composted to nourish an embodied visioning + creation of a world with soul reclaimed.
In the archetypal story of the Selkie, there is a theft of the soulskin, and its reclamation.
As we journey, compost and reclaim with the Selkie in Root + Rise this winter, individual re-wholing becomes the soil for the evolutionary activism of collective re-wholing.
It takes a good amount courage + capacity to reclaim and embody the depth of the soul’s essence, and we don’t have to go it alone.
Winter registration to Root + Rise is currently closed. You can sign up for the waitlist here.