Yes, it’s true! After months of hard work, interawakening has a new home in the shine+mojo website!
Please keep up with the latest blog posts and news here.
shine+mojo also includes resources for personal, organizational, and community healing, growth, and transformation so please check those offerings out as well. Groups for spiritual and psychological healing are being organized in the South Florida area too. We would love to have you join us if you are local!
Hello to all interawakening readers! In the next month, I will be launching a whole new way to learn about individual and social transformation called shine+mojo. Please stay tuned for the next evolution of interawakening and thank you for reading!
Hugs,
Katherine
If you follow how social change meets spirituality, you have likely run across the work of Gail Hochachka. If you have not, I advise you to get to your google-ing and avail yourself of all of the wonderful resources she provides through her organizational commitments, her teaching, and her writing.
I wanted to share one of her latest offerings to the interawakening community:
The dark moon envelops me,
holds me in a sweet blanket of tearful surrender.
Mourning unborn Life,
Roads not traveled,
Lives not shared,
Endings.
The blanket of darkness envelops—
Holds.
Space and time collapse in death,
Energy flows free.
Which door will open?
Which path will unfold?
The grieving of loss beckons the heart to open further—
To feel Death,
and rise in hopeful anticipation of
Birth.
The in-between uncertainty
and its enveloping darkness Potentiate.
Patience—embracing, sitting, Be-ing, opening, loving, mourning.
The dark Goddess holds it all.
Embodiment is no small feat. It is, however, your birthright.
In my view, we get born into bodies as our souls pour into these infamous “skin bags,” but becoming fully embodied is not a given. Even relatively minor traumas or unsupportive primary family environments may halt full embodiment as states of dissociation remain preferable to constant awareness of one’s own pain. This is best seen without judgment because partial embodiment upon birth usually serves to protect the emerging psyche until a fertile environment is present. Disembodiment then becomes a stage of one’s own growth.
So, rather than being an affliction of the “mentally ill” and a state limited to a unfortunate few as most might imagine, I posit that dissociation from one’s embodied experience is our norm. Most of us, especially in Western contexts, live disembodied lives to varying degrees. This means that our society and culture have been built upon and structured from places of human incompleteness. Thus, the Age of Enlightenment and the subsequent gifts of the modern era only just begin to inform how we as humans would best approach our lives, each other, and our collective engagements even though those antiquated and disembodied individual and social habits are what seems to surround us and feel most real. Our past appears as our present, and incompleteness pretends to be fullness.
Think of your current surroundings, including the buildings, social systems, and interpersonal mores, as ancient rather than modern and up-to-date. If you have ever visited a historical site of ruins, you will then have a picture of what I am effecting to portray. We’re living in the equivalent of an ancient Rome or Athens with perhaps beautiful (and often ugly) vestiges of a disembodied past around us. My point is that what we surround ourselves with everyday, including our own inner landscapes, are only partial truths and do not reflect to us the fullness of our humanity. As many have said, we are human becomings rather than human beings.
Why begin the new year with such unsettling news?
I believe that all of us at some point touch into the places inside ourselves that feel unsettled. Often, in a moment of pain, uncertainty, or struggle, a feeling can well up that suggests that the pieces we have put together do not complete the puzzle. Something is felt to be missing or “off.” It can often feel like we are not as well as we might hope, that things are not turning out as we had imagined, or as a deep disappointment. Often, we push these feelings back into our subconscious because they threaten how we have chosen to live our lives, and we cover those feelings with distractions of various kinds—food, activity, and work can all serve to pacify the small but strong voice that feels the pain of living in incompleteness.
In the new year, we are all offered a fresh start to deepen, heal, and grow. I want to reach out and proclaim as loudly as I can from the virtual mountain tops that this state you reside in and have come to know as normal is only a partial truth. Inside of you lies the seeds of radical embodiment, and with those, a full expression of yourself as a divinely human being/becoming. Your pain serves then as a fantastic guide to show you where to dig, open, and explore. And, while pain is well painful, this profound inquiry into your pain is a journey that will lead you deep into your own heart and will illumine your body and ignite the spark of your spirit.
Embarking down the road to recovery from disembodiment has been my most worthy quest. Inviting and claiming radical embodiment has offered me the opportunity to read from the future and live the new world now rather than rely on antiquated and out dated models for human relating and social architecture. It has also brought me into contact with fellow pioneers and visionaries that are dreaming reality into being.
I invite you to join us, find your human birthright, and dance your way into cocreating our shared existence in the collective interawakening. I am happy to guide you in this process if you are curious about your next steps to find your own radical embodiment. Much love and happy new year! May this year be the year that you come home.
Great article in the newest issue of Tikkun magazine! Nine Qualities of the Spiritual Activist by Kabir Helminski
