Entering In...

I remembered to look for the white door, climbing the one flight of stairs up to her space. Incense was present, and the large living room was welcoming. She opened the door, big smile on her face, gave me a hug as I came in. She sat in the chair in the corner, I sat on the couch some distance away, bridged by two ottomans. Spacious. Bounded. Also grounded. She invited a “check-in” and some response to “why me?”, why her, for coaching conversations…?

As I had sat with that invitation from our phone conversation 10 days ago, I had watched myself choose and point to the outer reasons I knew to trust the Nudge here. I had first learned of her two, maybe even three years ago, without clear sense of what to do with knowing about her. The Circle-Way training work she does came at a time when I needed a way into circle that was more spacious than the current community in which I serve, learn, lead. The Fire&Water Leadership work I’ve observed from afar on Facebook resonates with the fire-water journey Lisa and I have been on for over five years now. And especially now, for this path for me seemingly opening outward in various ways: she’s an African-American, a woman, a leadership coach, healer, and spiritual seeker-presence…and more I have yet to learn, experience…Wind Warrior resonated with me…MotherPeace Shaman of Swords, a card I’ve often drawn.

When it comes right down to it, though? The integrative reason I feel drawn to work with her? I love her laugh and I trust her eyes. For all that she’s experienced in her life, in her own body, to have that laugh and the laughing-trickster eyes told my body that she’s a healer-warrior. I know I can learn a lot from her that I need to learn, in ways I need to heal in learning… Knowing this kind of work as I do, I also know I will be bringing stories and healing gifts to her as well. Working with me will nourish something in her or urge new connections in her path too. This is how Great Mystery seems to work with those who are willing…

I still danced in my words, of course. I named the Women Writing for (a) Change ‘spring troubles’, the spaciousness I feel in PeerSpirit/Circle-Way lineages of more ‘open-space technologies’ of gathering.  I named the draw I felt to her Earth-centric work, the elemental approach to our world today and living in energetic terms, spirit-worlds. “And,” I said, “I have a longstanding wound story that I think you might be able to help me re-write, hold differently, be in differently.” I couldn’t even name the one sentence description of my wound-story at first…I danced around it for a while…

Speaking without filter then? I have a long-standing wound story that black women hate me. Many, perhaps even most, have hated or perhaps softer, disliked me. Given the (academic, conceptually-violent) systems I’ve travelled in, I get some of that… I can rationalize this hatred, even understanding dynamics of it within the privileges I receive as a white woman in such pursuits. And I have taken on the pain that is theirs, foolishly trained to believe that such action was helpful for healing. My own patterns with black women are not very healthy…for me or for the various ‘hers’ I’ve encountered. They are healthier than they have ever been, but that’s not saying very much.

A long established pattern in my family of origin creates part of this dynamic: taking on the pain of those around me, to insure my own safety, security, being needed and not neglected. If I could anticipate and tend the pain or sadness or anger of my father, my mother, then my position in the family was secure. In a family conditioned against deep feeling, I was the deep feeling dumping ground, actively welcoming it and drawing it toward myself. This insured a relationship of need and desire with my father, my mother, “being special” with my uncles, the ‘favored one’ of the cousins, etc. (None of which may be as true as all that, but at least a seed of truth is there…).

This woman is writing a book—has been for years now—to offer a journey to freedom for women and men, African-American and White, after centuries of slavery largely untended (in healing ways) in our discourses today. A memory-paraphrase in my receiving of her words: anyone who enslaves another is also enslaved. As I sit with my own wound story, you could describe it in this lens: My ancestors benefitted and were not proactive enough in the horrific dehumanizing machine of slavery, so they and I have been enslaved in some fashion as well. Here, I would say I am enslaved to the anger of black women. Specifically black women, not men. I can speak enough ‘masculine’ that my relationship with black men has been different. It has danced a professional-courtesy and power-politic pattern.

I have my own anger, of course, or have had perhaps. It no longer explodes into rage the way it used to, so I’ve apparently done a lot of the griefwork I’ve needed to do—abandonment of the feminine in my family, emotional neglect, refusal of the body’s sacred wisdom, refusal of deep feeling and the essence of who I am. All of that remains, but now without the rage in me about it. It is this journey that has taught me a lot about anger—its sacred gifting, its power, its potential to warm and to destroy. I can honor the anger of black women and have learned to do so these last several years, as it came my way, directed specifically at me. I can do so from within my own experience.

I can see some ways I’ve been enslaved to that anger—giving it priority over my own safety, my own feelings; shrinking away from its power over me, making my own self small or hidden; taking on its pain, with hopes to participate in healing, in being human together in new and different ways.  None of these patterns is a seed of healthy connection toward wholeness. I shrink, horrified, afraid, and ashamed of our communal history.

There are other ways, liberating ways, that I’ve been able to hold my own center for life-giving being for all of us. Not enslaved then. I remember the mid-career theological faculty workshop that I co-led with a beloved mentor-scholar now teaching up at Yale Divinity School. The leadership team was a black man, Chinese-American woman, black woman, and me, a white woman. Wow did things explode in our two years and some of working together. I learned it was the easiest-hardest leadership job for me: my job became showing up and keeping my mouth and spirit completely shut. No matter what I said, it was not welcomed by the black woman, so the best practice was simply to be present and be quiet. Earning a lot of money to do so. Strange but also strangely satisfying, to honor and receive while holding my own and honoring her from a strategic distance.

I saw the white women scholars in the group degrading themselves in order to be heard in the largely African-American-Puerto-Rican-Cuban group, as a whole. Saying things like, “I know I’m a stupid white woman, but…[asking a question].” I made some foolish mistakes in our journey together too. I got publicly shamed for one of them. But I also knew the way forward was not to degrade myself publicly in order to participate. I apologized, tried to move on. No one is free where one of us has to degrade herself in order to be. I refused the apparently necessary “self-degradation to participate” pattern of the group as a whole. I became more and more voiceless in the group as a whole, but accepted that as a consequence I could live with.

So…even acknowledging then that I could have been holding onto some white fragility or defensiveness, I persisted in holding my own center, honoring my own voice and contributions in my journal-writing (because largely unwelcome out loud). I found ways to honor the anger in the room, the incredible woundedness in the room (which I did not know, could not know as they did), AND not be enslaved to it.

This was actually an incredible gift to me, the workshop leadership years. I saw writ large the inevitable power-politic of academic discourse, academic ‘community.’ It doesn’t really matter who is in control, which race or ethnicity is in the majority, the result is the same because the academic-social-architecture creates the self-and-other-degrading patterns in human beings. Good-hearted human beings, in old-guard structures, will do what has already been done to them. It's inevitable, in my view.

Those workshop years taught me that any new leadership task is to hold different containers, to approach initiation and formation in containers able to integrate and shape open-hearted, surrendering human beings. I know circle is one of those containers.

So yesterday, I entered in to a new stream of listening with a Wind Warrior Trickster-eyed, laughing-wisdom woman… I wonder what we will learn, together?