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?
