thanksgivinG, QUAKERISM & WHITE SUPREMACY

"Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking" - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief--
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
​
'Tis the season of thanksgiving, friends. Have you noticed addressing people as 'friends' has become the norm in leftist progressive circles? I've always thought it seemed kind of oogie when Quakers did it, but now that everyone's doing it (albeit without the Quaker capital 'F'), it feels easier to adopt, frankly. I always joke that in NYC (where I lived for the decade before moving to Philly), people would be like, "aaawww... you're a Quaker, like with the horse and buggy and the cute hats?" And here in PA, it seems like every little town has a street called "Meetinghouse Road." Increasingly, I hear Friendly phrases flying around like "holding you in the light" and "speaking truth to power." Every spiritual/healing organization is now integrating social justice into their offerings. I've even heard of the "Quaker pause" in equity circles. It makes me proud of this faith I was born into - one that isn't always easy to stick with. Part of the challenge is the sheer number of HOURS being a practicing Quaker demands each week: our business process is considered part of the spiritual life of the meeting, so every aspect of running the organization is done communally, rather than paying a staff. This, my friends (tee hee I get a chuckle each time) is *partly* why when you think "Quaker," you imagine a white, upper middle class, retired person. Who else has time? It's not a super easy path, especially for those of us who don't really consider ourselves Christian (that's a whole 'nother conversation), but I have continued with it because after some spiritual tourism, I believe that you'll always find problems if you dig deep enough, so the hole that's in your own backyard will probably be the deepest - or at least wrangling with the problems will be the toughest, most authentic and healing wrangling you do. 
Say, like, we wrangle with the famous 19th century painting "The First Thanksgiving," depicting the Plymouth settlers and the Wampanoag peacefully sharing a meal, which is in keeping with the history as rendered by a Quaker (Edward Winslow). It's a lot like the way we've spun William Penn's "treaty" with the Lenni Lenape, disappearing all the violence. So maybe we should talk about colonization too.
We've been doing more yoga in class, as our practice becomes more physical to balance the cooler weather. I don't want to paint a 5000-year-old tradition into some happy image of a Thanksgiving smorgasbord of offerings. 
But I should back up. My teaching has been a way of sharing the aspects of Quakerism most dear to me: making way for a direct, unmediated experience of the spiritual plane - one that happens from the inside. Cultivating a capacity and reverence for inner stillness. Practicing peace with ourselves and with one another. Discerning your next right step by listening for the still small voice within (whether you call that your conscience, The Universe, your tradition's word for the divine, or the IFS Self). And then experimenting with embodied ways of accessing all that in a syncretic practice that might best be dubbed Somatics, drawing from multiple traditions including yoga, modern dance, and polyvagal techniques. 
Let's take a moment to wrangle with the tough stuff about syncretism. If we're claiming to be a politicized space that is concerned with addressing oppression, we need to acknowledge some things about the lineage of Somatics - and here I'm drawing on the work of Marika Heinrichs. The term was coined in the '70's by Thomas Hanna, a professor of divinity and philosophy deeply interested in neurology and Feldenkrais' investigations of movement patterning. Most of the teachers clustering around Hanna were white, and most had BIPOC mentors emerging from traditions that weren't being credited. So the field of Somatics has at its origins a practice of invisibilizing black, Asian, and indigenous cultural traditions, stripping them of their spiritual elements to legitimize them as a science. One way we can address this decontextualization/colonization of sacred traditions is first to acknowledge it, and then to try to find ways to repair that harm. One reparative way to dismantle supremacist culture is to refuse the premise of stripping practices down to render them as "science." To refuse the separation of embodiment from the sacred is to re-infuse our own bodies with a sense of spiritual worth that predates white patterning towards domination and control. Ideally we'd pursue this through our own ancestral lineages, to place spirit firmly back in our own bodies, lands, and practices. The problem is that many of these traditions have been "lost" (by which we mean, burned, drowned, and tortured out of the largely female bodies that contained their wisdom). So we do our best, we search for teachings from our own traditions and hold our borrowed practices with reverent regard and blunder and own our mistakes and keep trying to reinvigorate our relationship to all life as holy.
So on this Thanksgiving, I want to send you so much gratitude for bringing yourselves to this work and this beautiful community - and to my own spiritual home in the Meetinghouse! I often bust on my faith - it's my inner teenager's way of holding something precious at arm's length. But while she's busy over there in the corner with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, James Dean style, I want to share with you that I LOVE sharing it with you. I mention often the South Asian practice of covering your mouth, or whispering, when you utter the name of your beloved. It's like that. Too dear to shout about. So let me whisper in your ear, dear friend: thank you for companioning me through these incredibly difficult times, for showing up again and again willing to share your strength and heart with one another. Thanks to those of you who put up with "check ins" when they're uncomfortable and new, and to those of you who guide others through the discomfort, believing we need to dispel the shame about our bodies to re-engage with their wisdom and know what's really up, individually and collectively, and then proceeding in a way that authentically accounts for that reality. #runonsentence. Thank you for connecting before and after class about what it felt like to be hustled into a bomb shelter in Israel and how that Amichai poem landed in your body and what to do with the anger and how to acknowledge multiple wounds in the room and still work for peace. And still believe in peace. And still hold out for peace. And still...
Thank you.