Speaking to our roots
Hello Dear One,
Happy Earth Day, and thank you for coming on this journey with me. In honor of earth day and getting started with the process of transformation during this unprecedented time - step one of phase one is to get re-acquainted with the ground within us, with the roots and earth within us that help us feel anchored.
What are our roots made of, why are they so important, especially in the early stages of change? What can we acknowledge about the ways we have ignored them, and also cared for them? How do we establish a new relationship going forward?
Before I share my thoughts, it’s important to anchor into your own thoughts and connenction to roots. Please share in the comment section below. I’m excited to read your responses!
With love,
Kirin
Raging rivers of justice
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Do you feel it?
Forgotten rivers now raging, once dammed
in margins and crevices of earth
where rock meets bone
Reservoirs catching the unsung hopes, dreams, anger, grief of our Black, Indigenous, Brown, earth ancestors.
Do you feel it?
The power of ancestors un-damming, flowing
re-hydtrating thirsty dry deserted lands and hearts.
Roaring
BLACK LIVES MATTER
May we flow with it
Knowing this bend serves all the others.
May we flow to remember how it feels to be carried downstream
in the journey towards justice.
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Hello Dear One,
Take time to tune into your body, close your eyes if it feels safe and feel the collective wave of justice that is sweeping through our globe in support of Black lives. Feel the river of liberation that has been un-dammed. How does it feel inside your body? What emotions are unearthing? What's being un-dammed inside of you? How are you called to spend your time since the currents unmistakable arrival? Take some time with this. Journal about it, draw it, speak about it with loved ones.
Then ask yourself:
How do I stabilize the energy rising within me so I can strengthen and expand my capacity (imagine deepening, widening and lengthening from our base) to flow with the changing landscape of our world?
If my life is a prophecy by my ancestors, what prophecy am I meant to fullfill now?
Our world has entered an era of service.
What we are witnessing in our wold right now isn’t just an “intense” time due to circumstance. We are witnessing planetary transformation, the beginning of a new era. Our global community is in a long over-due reckoning that many of us pushed aside in order to hold onto comfort, ease and privilege at the expense, suffering, and death of our Black, Indigenous and Brown bodied community members and our precious Earth. The river of reckoning is clearly letting us know we begin making amends by uplifting our Black brothers and sisters, and continue to do so until they are thriving. There will be more currents of reckoning to come, each will ask us to ground and heal through collective service. We are being asked to dissolve boundaries, even as we erect new ones, to expand our definition of neighbor, family, friend, work so that we care for our beloved Black community as we would our own flesh and blood. It will take time and this is the time , time to usher balance and humility back into our fragmented lives, systems and communities through grounded service.
It will take work to stay a float as we cross the threshold into this new age. For support, remember the raging river. We can’t physically see it yet we can certainly feel it. Un-damming a giant body of water brings new life by washing away structures that aren’t deeply rooted or flexible while changing the structure of anything that can withstand the rapids. It's a natural process of destruction that supports new landscapes.
So when we ask how do we show up at this time, how do we show up for our Black community during a global pandemic, there is a growing list of brilliant articles, organized protests and political work to inspire action. To be prepared to show up and act in a good way we also have to continue to revolutionize our internal worlds. Take time to feel the state of your body and ask
Am I grounded, rooted and flexible enough to stay in this river, to be changed by it, to welcome it, to fall a part, grieve and still stay in the river?
Am I rooted enough to release the rigid and privileged parts of myself that aren't flexible or grounded enough to flow with supporting Black lives?
Maybe it’s not safe for you to be in the river yet without being taken under, especially if you are new to the movement. Honor where you are and work your way towards the water, it will eventually carry you away if you don’t. BE DILIGENT, DISCIPLINED, CONSISTENT in uplifting, strengthening and taking up practices that support your roots and body, release what doesn't. Let's lay the foundation we need to be effective, strategic, able to listen, be wrong and activate our unique contribution and prophecy. As we do we will begin to feel we aren’t just “showing up” or “helping” – that is the language of savior mentality that we are learning to change. We are coming into alignment with our humanity, our purpose, with Truth, becoming more integrated as individuals and as a collective.
May we all have the courage to be with the raging rivers of forgotten ancestors coursing through our collective and within our own bodies. Remember these waters are ultimately here to heal us all, restore balance and justice. This time will require us to be embodied so we can be of service, grounded so we can be of service, humble and able to make mistakes to be of service, connected more deeply than we ever have to be of service. With much love,
Evolving and flowing with you
Kirin
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forward onto someone whose heart could use this medicine. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Election care
“Our freedom and liberation are not contingent on the outcome of this election. I invite you to say it out loud. What comes up for you? What’s resistant? What’s open?
The truth of the prayer above has been emerging and rooting within me in the quiet, still, slow space of a single unwavering commitment I made to myself after the presidential debate: to walk, outside, every day, to not miss a moment of Autumn's precious exquisite unraveling, so I can have the courage to acknowledge the innate unraveling that occurs within my body at this time of year, to have the courage to witness it, let it be, with the same beautiful eyes I lay upon Autumn days and nights.
In my last letter to you, I shared a crisis care note to support those affected by the fires. We asked:
“How do we create a container of support around us during times of crisis?”
This question (and the guidance in the crisis care note) continues to remain critical and relevant, as we are still living and acting from a state of crisis, especially with the election looming, especially those of us who are capable leaders charging ahead to ensure Trump doesn’t get re-elected, among other things.
Take a pause here, is this you? It’s OK if it is, it’s expected given all we have been through this year. And yet, can you also feel that we are being asked to create a new norm?
We can take pause, remember who we are, feed ourselves and our spirits while doing the work we are called to do. In fact, as leaders, as models, it’s an integral part of our work, our responsibility, to make room for an essential regenerative pause so we can lead while rooted in our essence. An invitation to begin this process NOW – not after the election. This song from the beloved Seasoned Leader Rebekka Goldsmith always brings me back to the feeling, and song of my spirit.
Slowing down now isn't just about self-care, it's strategic. The medicine of slow keeps trauma responses, that are inevitably forming and re-emerging in response to this triggering year, from penetrating into our body and psyches. Pause is a foundational tool that allows us to digest waves of urgency, numbness, or despair that come in times of crisis and elections. The space offered from pausing allows us to discern what actually needs to be done, how to do our tasks potently, and what is unnecessary weight from the unchecked colonial impulse to fix and save. More importantly, it's in the quiet, still, slow spaces with myself, the leaders, and organizations I serve, where we feel a new version of justice, a deep-felt sense of indelible power and liberation emerging. Visions that cannot rise in our attachment to doing as the key to salvation.
It may be election season, but this election thankfully sits inside of Fall – the season that supports us in slowing down. A time when we turn our external fire inward to return home to the medicine of ourselves, of balance, of un-doing, in return, justice roots within us and then without in due course. What do you need to trust this cycle?
Autumn, my ancestors, and I will continue to reach our hands out to you, asking you to join us in pausing because we CANNOT do this alone, we need you. May we have the courage and support to welcome spaciousness in our body, homes, and work every day so our spirits can have a place to be, rest, and remind us:
Our freedom and liberation are not contingent on the outcome of this election.
May this prayer root inside of us and stay close to our hearts.
THE SEASONED LEADER MEETS RECHARGE TV:
I had an absolute HOOT chatting and modeling the “how” of self-care in urgent times with the beloved Adrianna Locke. Check it out, follow along with the exercises, and be inspired to find new ways to be in conversation around the complexity of our world with yourself and others. There's a great section on the “privilege” of self-care, a topic that often generates a lot of confusion and frustration with ourselves when we consider taking care of ourselves as leaders.
COMMUNITY SUPPORTED HEALING:
I have an ask. I’ve spent the last many weeks doing an honest assessment of the real cost of being a community-based healer. It’s led me to create space for community-supported healing at Brownswell.
The truth is I’m not a small business owner. I’m a community healer housing my sacred work in the container of a business, not to be limited by the red-tape of the non-profit industrial complex.
The truth is, I don't share about most of my work, which is largely pro-bono or low-cost. I guide multiple projects with non-profits, institutions, other healers, and individuals to invest in training and infrastructure that will embed healing into our world on a systemic level.
Projects that are de-mystifying how to transform toxic masculinity, addressing the largely unacknowledged ancestral trauma in my South Asian community, expanding resources for BIPOC folks to access land and nature, training institutions on how to create space for our spiritual and emotional selves in the workplace, in our change-making strategies, and more.
I love doing this work, and to keep the quality of this sawa (service) resilient, and flowing we need to find creative ways to receive for what we give to our world.
If you feel the impact of the work at Brownswell, if you want to support efforts of sending healing ripples out to permeate into our lives and institutions, if you want to uplift a community supported model of healing, or if you benefit from my writing, please consider offering a one-time donation or sign-up for a subscription on my new donation page.
Let’s exercise the principle of reciprocity and build an abundant pool of resources so that the work can continue and spread out to other community-based healers.
Healers of all kinds are needed now more than ever to usher in and guide a larger collective pause so we can regenerate from centuries of crises that have gone untended. I deeply appreciate your support in creating a platform for us to pause while we rise and share our medicine with ease from a resourced place. Thank you for your contribution to transformative healing justice.
Finally, a meditation for when it's feeling hard to pause, when you are feeling tender, or like you are going to crumble under the weight of it all. I know it's not easy to undo our urgent patterns. I'm here with you as we find a new way.
Crisis Care
I initially wrote this as the fires began to rage along the West Coast, myself, my loved ones shrouded in dark plumes of smoke, gasping for breath, for hope, after multiple waves of crisis that have yet to make their way to shore. Unprecedented times do not seem to capture the truth of the moment we find ourselves in - it’s texture, the way it seeps into our sleep and sits with us at every turn. There are few corners it can’t find it’s way in to. In some places the fires continue to rage while others are still growing, and the fires within continue to roar. The most comforting salve I have found this year is the gift of curiosity.
I’m learning that curiosity and crisis go very well together even though it can be hard to reach for early on, especially when our basic survival is threatened. Yet it continues to be a powerful ally. When I was spinning out the other day I made myself ask my ancestors for a guiding question before going to bed. I woke up to this inquiry the following morning:
How do we build a supportive container around us during crisis?
I loved it. It reminded me we are re-learning that crisis happens, that we are students of crisis right now, and although we are in multiple moments of chaos, we still get to build a container of support around us to be inside these crises with more grace. Hold the question close to your heart and see what comes. Here's what came to me:
THE BASICS: These are suggestions to help your nervous system ground so your own intuition can kick in.
An important note before diving in: community is your biggest asset. who are the pod of folks who you are looking out for and you know are looking out for you. The conditions we are under at this time make us weary to our bones. Personal care is critical but can be difficult to follow through with in trying times. It’s equally crucial that we begin to engage in our personal care strategies with our community to keep apathy and coping cycles regulated while inviting in curiosity and possibility. The strategies below can be done on your own but if that gets difficult do them with your loved ones. We will need to begin to normalize processing through pain, emotions, reaching for joy and love together. Perhaps that was the way it was meant to be all along.
TAPPING AND SHAKING: Tap and shake the shit out of your body. It keeps the organs, muscles, and meridians flowing and keeps elevated cortisol from building. Watch this Qi-Gong video - the last 5 minutes have a great basic tapping routine. If you are able to do the entire routine even better.
MAKE NOISE: I'm serious - yell, scream, moan, sing (singing is great) do it with those around you. It's cathartic, keeps the upper chakra's flowing so your mind stays clear. It can also help with inviting in silliness and laughter.
BELLY BREATHING: hand on the belly as you walk around, when you sit down or lay down, breathe slow breaths into the belly and slow exhales out the mouth, make noise or sighs if you need to.
CALL FRIENDS YOU TRUST WHO AREN'T IN FIRES ZONES TO HOLD SPACE: another way to have cathartic release if space allows when you are not taking care of survival needs. Ask them to reach out to you from time to time.
ENCOURAGE EACH OTHER TO LAUGH AT LEAST ONCE A DAY/TAP/MAKE NOISE: if you are especially prone to anxiety and have a strong fight or flight response it will be hard to do anything on this list. Use your support pod to keep your energy and breath moving.
LIMIT SOCIAL MEDIA TIME: if this is a hard one for you, have folks in your support pod help with this. It's OK if social media scrolling is part of your coping mechanism. And it also feeds anxiety super fast while putting our body into a collapsed position creating pathways for helpless thoughts to come through over curiosity.
PRAYER/SET INTENTIONS: or something that connects you to forces bigger than us humxns. Set an intention or prayer with your loved ones throughout the day, remind yourself of it.
IF GRIEF IS COMING, LET IT OUT: I know you've seen this before, still stands true now. It's also OK if you aren't feeling grief just yet.
A REMINDER THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE TENDING TO “NORMAL” LIFE AT THIS TIME. Work, projects, etc. are not critical. Safety, tending to basic survival needs is enough and a beautiful aligned use of time.
EAT AND SLEEP: I put this at the end because I know how hard it is to eat and sleep during crisis. Once again, how can your pod and support people help with this?
EXTRAS: if you have space and time or are called to do so:
JOURNAL EXERCISE: In rough times I like to write down all of the hard feelings I'm struggling with. Once I get it all out I go back and underline the essential sentiments. Then I put on my curiosity lens and turn the sentiments into questions. Sometimes a larger meta-question presents itself that I treat as a guiding light.
READ: I loved this post from Mary Good. It beautifully holds the complexity of this moment - the despair and the possibility of something else coming our way. How could we allow our hearts to do the same?
PULL TAROT CARDS: I pulled cards from I-Ching deck for the question at the beginning of this newsletter, which then inspired new questions. This practice helps me connect to my spirit wisdom, a different perspective on what's happening, access creative tools for resiliency, and feel the support of ancestors and guides.
RESOURCE LIST:
This is a compiled list of resources that you may find helpful during this time. It includes sections on mutual aid, general evacuation and preparedness tips, important alerts, housing, self-care, and places to donate!
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A crisis is meant to break us down, as hard as that is to hear. And yet, we can still create a container around us that reminds us how to stay curious and pick ourselves back up. There is a way through this, it's buried in your muscle memory and likely whispering to you in your dreams. I am holding us and the land deeply in my heart, may enough of us remember we have agency even in experiences that are largely out of our hands.
Tenderly,
Kirin
If you found this useful help spread the love so more of us can access healing by:
offering a donation
share on social media
forward on to someone whose heart could use this medicine.
Thank you, from my heart to yours.
Celebration as a tool for integration
My first time after many years making Valentine’s Day cards with my nieces.
I have been feeling myself and others hitting yet another pandemic wall one that has me waking up to the thought “another day where I can't (fill in the blank), another day in exile. Can I keep doing this? What do I do here?”.
What do you wake up to?
Thankfully, the curious and wise one in me is well developed. It reminds me to keep my phone in a separate room so that it's not the first point of contact in my day (I listen MOST of the time - hehe).
The lover in me keeps a small batch of $2.99 flowers from my neighbor Linda's store next to my bedside table.
My wise one gets me to reach over and touch the petals to remember the beauty of the earth, to come back into my body. Sometimes I find myself singing as I do this.
My root becomes activated, drawing me out of bed to tend to my vessel - brush my teeth, start up a pot of tea, take my vitamins, make my favorite smoothie, gently begin to stretch and wake up. I move slow - it reminds me that, as an empath and empathic leader, I have spent most of my life with and in touch with everyone but myself.
What initially felt like exile then begins to soften and I remember the last 12 months has been one of the most intimate and beautiful journey's I have had with myself, my most beloved ones, the earth and my work. I am feeling that as we will one day begin to touch and connect in person, I will be able to show up to life with a texture of beauty, joy, intimacy and potency that I had once dreamt of, but never thought possible for “someone like me" (that's a story for another time!).
As I sit with clients and create content for the Dancing with Darkness E-course, I'm seeing the most effective prescription for the unique flavor of collective weariness we are currently facing is celebration.
“When I don't celebrate it shows up as stuckness in my life and work.”
Not my words - a brilliant realization from a beloved leader I have the privilege of guiding. It was so perfectly timed, and reflective of the natural laws that govern the flow of energy as leaders, especially empathic leaders.
When we don't take time to celebrate ourselves in the context of a culture that is fixated on “what's next” - we stifle our natural ability to keep our energy flowing and resilient.
By celebrate I mean sincere pausing to honor, acknowledge and witness how far we've come. An act of love for ourselves and others.
Celebration, like the expression of grief or anger, is an integration tool.
As much as we are meant to process and integrate difficulty in our lives, so too are we meant to pause in order to integrate all the ways we have grown. A build up of unacknowledged growth has parallel effects as unprocessed shadows.
I feel especially called to share this message with you, dear one, as I am seeing and feeling our collective patience and resilience with the events of the last 12 months wanning.
There are so many threads feeding our collective wanning, yet I can feel that the particular flavor of weariness we are facing is deeply connected to the absence of honoring what we have already weathered.
As much as we continue to face uncertain wearying conditions, we are also prevailing, deepening, evolving - have you/we given authentic consistent recognition of this truth? My earth body is reminding me that celebration is like harvest, when we revel in the fruits of our labor. I’m also seeing the harvest season shows up not only in our annual cycle, but also in our weekly and monthly cycles. We are able to dance with weariness by nurturing our natural integration systems of harvesting, loving and releasing into our lives.
There's no doubt we will continue to have to problem solve our way through more complexity and crisis in 2021, sometimes in rapid succession -
but make no mistake - there is space and imperative for pause and pleasure.
I often hear folks say - “I don't feel the grief or like celebrating” along with the collective illusion that we don't have time for these processes. Build a system for it anyways - and be gentle when it doesn't happen. As leaders we have all internalized systems that bypass our bodies and natural impulses in favor of “productive action”. We will have to build structures of pause, and exhibit consistent devotion to them over a long period of time, to sensitize our systems to the natural pull of our internal integration systems.
I love also that this download is coming as Black History month comes to a “close”. May we not close this chapter, may we let the celebration of Black life - past, present, global, local - continue and become embedded into our natural systems of celebration.
PROMPTS TO INVITE CELEBRATION
Here are the prompts I've been sharing with clients this month to help ease the flavor of weariness we are currently facing. Try them on and make it your own.
What is ONE/TWO things you thought were impossible in the last 12 months that became possible?
Share the prompt and your responses with trusted people in your pod,or with the earth. Have a covid safe, “making the impossible possible” party.
Get yourself some flowers, foraged, or bought.
Or something else that engages the senses and brings beauty into your home.
What rituals have allowed you to make the impossible possible the last 12 months? Take a moment to recognize them.
As my client expressed their stuckness in the absence of celebration, they also acknowledged the deep investment they've made to cultivating their internal resilience in our work together. Over our covid-safe phone session we could both feel, across space and time, the indelible presence of grace, compassion and power they've developed as a result of their investment, even in the face of this challenging year. As a witness to their ever strengthening, life-giving power, I have seen them learn to choose pause that holds space for their love, grief and everything in between over and over again in this process - even when it felt nearly impossible, counter-intuitive, “ineffective”, or “irresponsible” to their role as a leader and activist.
Their story is a formidable node in a larger web of empathic leaders at Brownswell, courageously choosing pause, each in their own way, to find power that continues to stand, celebrate, grieve, and strengthen in stormy times. May their example invite celebration, love and pleasure back into our hearts and leadership.
In celebration,
Kirin
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Thank you, from my heart to yours.
If you need support embodying powerful internal resilience and sustaining your energy as a leader or organization, even in crisis, check out my e-course here, or reach out for a session.