InnerVentures

Author: Inner Ventures

  • Beauty, Light and Truth

    ‘We can’t be reminded enough of how much beauty there is all around us—we who are so often too rushed or numbed or worried to see it and to feel the ease that it brings, in beauty, the Invisible Embrace.’ –  John O’Donohue 

    “Beauty is made to seem naïve and romantic (but) much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. The Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence and unity… we feel most alive in it’s presence for it meets the needs of our soul.” – Susan Enrich

    Lyrics by INDIA ARIE  – “I Am Light”
    I am light, I am light [x4]
    I am not the things my family did
I am not the voices in my head
. I am not the pieces of the brokenness inside
    I am light, I am light [x4]
    I’m not the mistakes that I have made or any of the things that caused me pain. 
I am not the pieces of the dream I left behind
    I am light, I am light [x4]
    I am not the color of my eyes. 
I am not the skin on the outside
. I am not my age, I am not my race, my soul inside is all light
    All light, all light [x2]
I am light, I am light [x2]
    I am divinity defined
, I am the God on the inside
, I am a star, a piece of it all
, I am light

    “The vastness that is seen by the mind is not true,
    But the vastness of the mind that is seen, that is true…………..

    “Behind the field of efforts is a space of effortless silence. Any effort to be silent becomes merely a cloud passing. The silence is already inherent as the Self and a natural space of ‘Isness’ or pure Being – undisturbed and undisturbable as the True Self. You are here, it is our true place. Sometimes in front is the effort to become, but this is watched and watchable. When this is observed, don’t go with the pull towards thoughts, this is the habit of the mind. Stay as you are – silent and empty.

    There is no tension in the Self because there is no effort . If the feeling of effort is coming, that is OK. What is making effort? See if effort can be found. Don’t identify.

    There is a space within us where nothing changes, Because it is always present the changeful can be observed. You are the undisturbed Self.

    But the habit is to doubt this. Watch both the doubt and the habit without becoming involved. Remain in the natural state” [Silent, Still and Unchanging].

    Sri Mooji.

  • ‘WAITING’ by Pierre Theilhard de Chardin

    “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today
what time will make of you tomorrow.
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”

    ― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  • What’s Going On With Men – by Bethany Webster (Womboflight.com)

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women. (See resources below.) This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 

    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.

    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2018

  • The Miracle of Existence

    The following is a quotation from Sri Mooji:

    When you lose the eyes of the ego,

    you see with the eyes of God.

    While identity persists in us,

    we see and experience the world

    shaped by our projections alone.

    When the ego falls away,

    only then do we see the world

    as it truly is,

    the miracle of God,

    the Miracle of Existence.

  • Aging is Humbling

    These days I frequently  find myself sitting in wonder and confusion as to where my life has gone. My logical mind tells me that I have now lived three score years and seven; I have memories and momentos that help to inform the reality of this, along with the wear and tear on my body and the changes in my appearance that mark the passage of the years. From that reality it does seem a long time. The advancement of so many technologies and the changes in cultural norms that I have witnessed throughout my life also provide a perspective that supports that whole view.

    Yet here I am, temporarily but frequently lost in an alternative reality in which I still feel like a young person whose life is not finite; destined to certain death, yes, and yet strangely outside of time, living in an eternal now that gives an illusion of unchanging youth. In this way I catch myself feeling about 18, in ageless, unblemished.

    I know I am not alone in having these experiences. Perhaps we all feel this way when we drop into a particular kind of inner reality. (When I reflect on my dreams, for example, I seem ageless in them). I know it as an awareness that springs from deep inside me, as though my soul hasn’t aged along with my body, and a realisation comes to me, even as I am writing this, it seems to me that our souls do not age in the way our bodies do.

    People talk about ‘old souls’ when they witness young children expressing wisdom beyond their mental age, but my sense is that our souls are outside of time in the linear sense, and rather than ageing, they mature according to each person’s particular life experiences, or, in the case of young children, their experiences in previous lives. (Where else could such precocious wisdom come from? But that is a debate for another time.)

    I can see how my life has provided a series of lessons, some of which have enabled me to learn and grow, others have left me none the wiser and therefore needing to repeat a pattern until I reach a new level of awareness. This growth process is happening through strivings to achieve, through the challenges of pain and loss, through the affairs of the heart, through service and importantly through grace.

    When I experience my life from this meta perspective I feel held and at peace with myself through a level of acceptance of what is. But when I am faced with the stark limitations of my ever-aging body and mind, I find myself struggling to accept the inevitable decline in stamina and strength, in mental agility and in memory. I am frustrated daily by the restrictions and limitations on my activities and achievements. It requires a level of humility, patience and self-acceptance that do not come easily. Life becomes a practice in mindfulness, setting appropriate boundaries and allowing time for rest, which can lead to a refining and maturing of the soul. Paradoxically, we become more child-like and free. The Dalai Lama is a wonderful example of this. In the absence of the disciplines which enable this process we can so easily become negative, bitter and cantankerous – the archetypal grumpy old man or woman.

    I am trying to age gracefully and experience life from my soul’s reality, while honouring my aging body’s truth. I appreciate that, as a man, I do not face the same cultural pressures imposed on older women for their looks and appearance, but it is still a challenge and a big lesson in humility.

  • A Winter of Words

    In a winter of words
    the verbal garden hibernates.
    The streams dry up
    in a drought of expression,
    a writer’s depression.
    It is pencil down-time
    where poetry lies fallow;
    barren silence on a blank page.

    It’s a waiting time,
    a frustrating time,
    without metaphor or rhyme.
    The voice deprived of ways
    to map an inner path.
    No light to shine on truths,
    no eyes to see beyond
    and penetrate the dark.

    Spring’s sap will surely come
    to fuel an inspiration
    for fresh communication,
    bursting through earth’s crust
    like lava flow or geyser steam
    enriching inner landscapes
    with those rare minerals
    from the archetypal depths.

    Skillful words that can unmask
    the previously unseen,
    purposefully drawing us
    closer to our soul,
    to meet a subtle promise
    that we barely knew
    was waiting – so patiently
    inside our broken heart.

    – Ardhan Swatridge, Feb 2018

  • What does the Universe want from me?

    A poem by Erica Sarzin-Borillo   (http://www.mythichealingarts.com/)

    To hold a candle in the dark and illuminate what could not be seen
    And often what would not be seen

    To hold hold a pic in the minds of men to get to soul…
    To get to Truth…

    To chisel away at the Rock of Ages
    Containing the living Beauty within

    To crack the nut of Life
    Of mine and of yours

    I guess I don’t care how dirty
    I get in the process
    If trouble is what it takes
    to get to the Center
    Then I am an advocate for trouble
    If chaos has to be entered into
    In order to find order
    Then you will find me there
    Hanging by a single thread
    Over the abyss…

    I may be a sensitive
    In the light of day
    But there is much to life
    that needs the inner goods
    And I guess I was born to this work

    I am coming back
    with a piece of Eternity
    A chunk of World Soul
    that time and again
    Gets forgotten
    by the puppet world

    Oh I know the game
    I’m no different than you
    You will find me well dressed
    In my Sunday best
    Gorging on this mock up life
    (You know , we want and we want
    But we don’t know
    what we really want)
    So we buy it all and we buy it up
    But there’s never enough
    of this puppet stuff

    I’ve had my fill of what cannot fulfill
    So weary as I am
    and nearing “the end”
    I’m going in one more time
    I’m heading in for the Immortal Soul
    The One with whom I fell
    Deeply and eternally in love
    The One who partnered
    with Eros himself
    And birthed the child called Joy

    This is how the story goes
    Such love cannot be bought or sold
    Such joy cannot be measured

    When I die my fellow man
    I pray I will walk hand in hand
    With my authentic Soul
    And with my last breath
    Thank God for the true life I led!

    ESB
    from “The House of Gathering”

  • What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    What’s Going on With Men? The Mother Wound as the Missing Link in Understanding Misogyny

    by BethanyWebster

     “The Bewildered Pursuit” by Andrew Salgado

    What’s going on with men?

    With this massive wave of brave women coming forward with disclosures of sexual harassment across many industries, many of us, men and women alike, are grappling with the sobering reality of rampant misogyny. As a culture, we’re left to ask questions like, why do so many men have the impulse to disrespect, hate or violate women? Where does that really come from? And how do we stop it? 

    As an internationally recognized expert on the mother wound in women, I’m often asked to speak about the mother wound in men. At this time of mass disclosures about sexual assault, I wanted to write a piece exploring how the mother wound is the missing link in our understanding of misogyny. In this essay, I’ll examine how boys develop in the modern world, the unprocessed anger below the surface of the lives of men, the role of privilege and the inner work that both men and women can undertake to transform our situation.

    Oxford dictionary defines misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.”  To understand misogyny we have to explore the first relationship a man ever has with a woman; with his mother.

    For both girls and boys, the relationships with our mothers are one of the most significant relationship in our lives. It’s impossible to overstate just how foundational this relationship is and how it impacts our wellbeing well into our adulthood. In the first weeks and months of our lives, mother is food, mother is world, mother is body, and mother is self. For both women and men, the mother wound itself is a product of patriarchy, of living in a culture with domination of women at its core.

    “The mother-child relationship can be seen as the first relationship violated by patriarchy.“ ~Adrienne Rich 

    On a personal level, the mother wound is an internalized set of limiting beliefs and patterns originating from the relationship with one’s mother. The mother wound exists on a spectrum, with healthy, supportive mother/child relationships on one end and abusive traumatic mother/child relationships on the other end. Many complex factors go into how one’s mother wound manifests and where one falls on that spectrum. For men, it comes down to the specific dynamics that played out between a boy and his mother, as well as how the father supported or thwarted that primary connection. Because patriarchy—the  principle of domination—can be embodied by either a man or a woman, the mother or father may have played the role of patriarchal parent in a boy’s life. For example, some boys may have experienced their mothers as neglectful or as domineering. Some may have experienced their mothers as victims of their fathers or their mothers as the dominant one and their father the more passive one.

    “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.”  ~ bell hooks

    As a boy grows today in the modern world, he becomes socialized by his father, by other men, and by society about what it means to be a man. The patriarchal culture of media, education and religion also perform that function. Unfortunately, it’s well-documented that this socialization of the boy involves to some degree learning to dominate others, to shut down his emotions and to devalue women.  This constitutes both a personal and collective trauma.

    Healing personal trauma is central to undoing the patriarchy

    Contrary to our modern world, the history of civilization is full of examples of cultures giving boys the initiatory experience of graduating into manhood through a time of physical trials, which helps them symbolically cross a psychological bridge from the relative comforts of childhood into the rigors of adulthood. In this positive context, surrounded by male elders, some kind of physical/emotional wound occurs, helping the boy contact his inner strength, confidence and sense of responsibility. Today in the modern world, most boys experience wounding but without a positive transformation. There are few official rites, few wise elders and a dearth of male role models outside the toxic status quo.

    The cultural expectation to devalue women, including his mother, sets a boy up for cognitive dissonance about what his mother represents in himself, including the ability to express his emotions, to be vulnerable, to express physical affection, etc. In this way, his mother could be seen broadly as a “lost source” to the boy, and the father, as socializer of the boy into the world of men, could be seen as “severer of the bond” with the mother, with his source.

    For white men, privilege plays a role. In addition to discouraging their emotions and encouraging domination, society gives them unearned advantages that are denied to other groups including women and people of color.  According to American sociologist, Professor Michael Kimmel, privilege is invisible to those who have it.  This leaves white men with a triple wound; an injury to their ability to process their emotions, a blindness about their privilege and a lack of empathy for those they harm. This triple wound in white men has remained relatively unconscious and has caused unspeakable suffering in the world.

    I came across this stunning 1977 quote by Adrienne Rich from her essay in the book “On Lies, Secrets and Silence” which speaks powerfully to the connection between misogyny and the mother wound in men: 

    “Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism—the longing to remain a mother’s son, to possess a woman purely for him. These infantile needs of adult men for women have been sentimentalized and romanticized long enough as “love”; it is time to recognize them as arrested development, and to re-examine the ideal preservation of “the family” within which those needs are allowed free rein to the point of violence. Because the law and the economic and social order are heavily weighted in favor of men, the infantile needs of adult males are affirmed by a machinery of power, which does not affirm or validate the needs of adult women. Institutionalized marriage and motherhood perpetuate the will of male infants as law in the adult world.”

    What’s been happening with the #metoo movement, with women telling their stories of sexual assault and outing their abusers, is that the “free rein” that men have used to dominate women in the home and in the workplace is being increasingly curtailed. Women are less willing to remain the silent projection screen onto which men can project their disowned pain with impunity. And many male witnesses are no longer willing to look the other way.

    Assault as sexualized hostility

    Sexual assault is not about sex, it’s about power. Alexandra Katehakis, a sex therapist and Clinical Director for the Center for Healthy Sex in L.A. describes it this way: “Guys who engage in this type of behavior are incredibly rageful towards females. It often harkens back to childhood abuse. For example, maybe they had mothers who were emotionally abusive or who didn’t protect them from abusive fathers. As some men get older they act out that anger towards women in the language of sex. They sexualize their emotions because they don’t know any other way of comporting themselves.”

    It is as if the inner male child is unconsciously caught between his painful longing for the “lost source” represented by his mother and his cultural conditioning to hate her as a woman. Put another way, men are caught between a natural desire for their full humanity (the ability to be emotional, vulnerable and empathic) and their desire to remain privileged and in dominator mode. The thing is that one can’t have both. To hold on to dominator mode (patriarchy) is to increasingly lose access to your humanity. And to be fully human, one has to forsake the dominator mode, and all the insidious ways it can show up in oneself. No amount of privilege (wealth, power, fame, prestige) will ever compensate for the devastation, to whatever degree, that patriarchy has wrought on the little boy within him. No amount of power over others will ever make up for that lost part of himself. It can only be found through doing the inner work to reclaim it. 

    A man can find this “lost source,” not in the form of physical women, but in the form of exploring what it means to reclaim what the mother or the feminine represents within him, such as the feeling function, the world of emotions, the experience of deep connection within himself and a sense of authentic belonging with others. However, in order to access these vital capacities that have been in shadow, men first have to engage with the child within who is angry that there has been little payoff for forsaking these vital aspects of himself. 
     
    It’s easier to project rage onto a “mother substitute” or the “father substitute” out there in the world. Male privilege permits men a blindness to their mother and father wounds while the world burns. However, it takes courage to retract those projections and process the anger about the inner patriarch, the archetype of the cruel, unfeeling father, that granted him access to the world of men at the massive cost of disconnection from his true self, the innocent boy who came into this world capable of expressing empathy, emotionality, and vulnerability. The anger belongs with the patriarchal father (personal and/or collective), the “severer of the bond,” who betrayed the boy, who socialized him to give up a vital part of himself to be accepted in this world as a man. The anger also belongs with the mother who was unable to protect him from this patriarchal wound or who may have inflicted it herself. (See my article here about how patriarchy passes through the mother.) When men can direct their anger there, to where it truly belongs, things will really begin to shift.

    “Misogyny is a son’s outwardly projected rage on a mother who was unable to protect him.” 
    ~ Gabor Maté

    At its core, for men and women alike, the task of healing the mother wound is ultimately the same: to de-couple one’s inner and outer life from the lamination of “mother,” so that one’s full potential can be fully accessed and actualized.

    In his book “Under Saturn’s Shadow”, author and Jungian analyst, James Hollis brilliantly encapsulates it this way:

    “When we remember that patriarchy is a cultural contrivance, an invention to compensate for powerlessness, we realize that men, contrary to widespread opinions, are more often the more dependent sex. The Marlboro man, the rugged individualist, is most ambushed by his inner feminine, for he is most in denial. Whenever a man is obliged to be a good boy, or conversely he feels he must be a bad boy, or a wild man, he is still compensating for the power of the mother complex. 

    I do not say it is a man’s fault that he is so vulnerable, so dependent; that he is merely human. What is his responsibility is to recognize how deeply any child needs positive mothering and how much the pattern of that need sets his psychic life in motion and continues to operate beneath the surface. He may pretend to adult empowerment, hold the reigns of government or the purse, but the lines of stress reach deep down into his relationship with his mother. Men must grasp and accept this fact, and then take responsibility for it, or they will continue to play out infantile patterns forever.”

    Healing the mother wound for men involves removing their projected rage off of women and processing it towards its true target… with patriarchy itself and to the very specific traumatic events of their childhood in which that played out. 

    To do this deep inner work, it’s crucial that men get support from other men who have already done a significant amount of work on this journey themselves, including professional support from male therapists skilled in this area.

    Broadly speaking, men’s inner and outer work involves:

    1. Processing the anger about the parent (mother and/or father) who betrayed him by making him give up vital parts of himself in order to be considered a man in this world. Grieving about what that has cost him.
    2. Being honest about his life. Acknowledging his secrets and taking responsibility for his actions.
    3. Finding that lost inner source within him and working to re-claim it. Connecting with the child within him.
    4. Feeling genuine remorse about the ways that he has harmed other people and the earth by acting out his pain in unconscious ways, both personally and collectively, while taking empathic actions on a consistent basis.
    5. Finding community with other conscious men who are on this path of reclamation and reconciliation.

    In the long-term, men must commit to the long-term inner work. And in the short-term, men need to experience real consequences for their actions.

    Shawn Vestal explains that it’s not for a lack of training that men sexually assault in the workplace. “It’s not about what men don’t know. It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account.” In other words, until men have sufficient integrity to not sexually assault, real consequences must come into play at work and in relationships that halt the toxic behavior. Basically men need a global intervention, a resounding, societal “no” to wake up to the realities they’ve been oblivious to.

    To support this process, as women we have to say no in every way possible to the raging boy within the men in our lives, be they friends, colleagues, brothers or husbands. Back to Rich’s quote, women have to withdraw from the ways that we have over-functioned or mothered men. We have to “withdraw the breast, the lullaby and the constant attention associated by the infant with the mother.” That way, men can feel the full magnitude of their predicament, which is the beginning of lasting, meaningful change.

    Only by men feeling the painful gap of what women are no longer willing to do for them, will they experience sufficient motivation to finally step in and fill that gap from within themselves, which includes increasingly: 

    • Taking responsibility for their emotions, feeling them and processing them. Getting support.
    • Having sex as a way to connect, not a way to feel powerful
    • Soothing the little boy within him when he’s triggered
    • Differentiating between the pain of the past from what’s happening in the present
    • Becoming aware of his projections and seeing the women in their lives as people, not as objects
    • Centering and amplifying the voices of those who are marginalized, while listening and learning from them

    As women we must keep using our voices and speaking out about male abuse of power every chance we get and amplify the voices of other women who are enduring male abuse, particularly the voices of women of color and indigenous women.

    As women we must stop:

    • Catering to their illusions that come from an ignorance of their own privilege
    • Staying quiet to avoid conflict
    • Internalizing their projections from their disowned pain
    • Minimizing our feelings in their presence
    • Accepting crumbs of respect instead of what we truly deserve
    • Giving our power away in the form of emotional caretaking
    • Giving time and energy to men who refuse to do their inner work

    The truth is that women are very limited in how they can help men in their healing. We can hold space but we can’t do the work for them. It is their journey and they have to want it for themselves. In the meantime, let’s expand our awareness of our value outside the male gaze, prioritize our own inner work, and heal our own childhood wounds. Let’s hold strong boundaries with those who are not doing their inner work and spend more time with those who are. True sisterhood is a crucial source of nourishment for these times.

    Harnessing our anger as fuel for wise action

    The more we contact the truth of our worth as women, the more rage we will feel about the devastation toxic masculinity has caused. Our anger is an essential tool in this time, to sharpen our refusal to be compliant with oppression of any kind, including internalized misogyny directed at ourselves, and for white women, a refusal to be patriarchal to others, and specifically facing how we have facilitated the oppression of men and women of color.

    “One oppresses what one fears.” ~ James Hollis

    Healing from patriarchy requires that every privileged group actively confront their ignorance and cultivate sincere empathy for how their privilege has caused harm to others.

    Allowing oneself be emotionally affected by the depths of horrors that have been perpetrated by our privilege is a necessary but often avoided step in creating real equality between people. Just as white women need to endure the experience of feeling genuinely horrified about the ways in which we have, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitated white supremacy onto people of color, white men have to do the same about how their ignorance, afforded by privilege, has collectively caused an unspeakable amount of pain in the world to women, people of color and the planet itself.
    “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” ~ James Baldwin

    May this ever-rising tide of female anger be followed by a commensurate wave of brave men willing to explore their inner terrain, to embrace the abandoned boy within and to process the legitimate anger and grief about what patriarchy has stolen from them: their full humanity. Collective change will occur when enough individual men change.  May men take full responsibility and humbly embrace this raw, necessary discomfort as the medicine they need to heal their personal and collective mother wound. And may women refuse to allow the behavior of unconscious men to define them.

    © Bethany Webster 2017

  • Decisiveness, Uncertainty & Not-knowing

    Decisiveness is considered a valuable and necessary quality in contemporary society, and it has probably always been that way. One of early man’s essential survival skills was his ability to think quickly and act decisively under pressure, using his weapons, his physical fitness, his powers of observation and his cunning. Decisiveness is directly related to confidence and power, qualities of the healthy masculine archetype.

    I have heard many times that making the right decision is often not so important as making any informed decision, then committing to it fully and following it through. I have made major changes at different time of my life, and having made a decision over something big, I have been able to commit and not look back. But usually it has been carried out after months of anxiety and silent deliberation stemming from not knowing clearly enough. Having crossed the bridge, I have had a tendency to run away from the old situation, without proper resolution or completion.

    From the beginning not-knowing has been my familiar state. As a dreamy, artistic piscean it comes naturally to me to be able to float and flow in a watery reality. A reality that has also been a constant challenge to the more rational aspects of my character.

    During childhood my parents were uncomfortable with my dreaminess; worried, I guess, about my safety as I got older and began to do things independently of them, such that they wanted to know that I could look after myself.  They probably projected on me their own fears and lack of street-wise savvy.

    This situation played a significant part in my parents’ decision to send me to boarding school at the age of eight, where my education would ensure I could become a rational, disciplined, responsible model of manhood, ready to thrive in a harsh adult world that required confidence and clear precise decision-making.

    They wanted the best for me, and up to a point this patriarchal education impacted on me in positive ways. I did develop a rational mind. But the stressful nature of life in an all-male boarding school in the 1960s also distanced me from the sensitive boy I had been. It toughened me up in the sense that it limited my ability to feel pain and therefore pleasure too. I lived in fear a lot of the time, and I developed ways to stay safe by fitting in, not challenging things I did not understand or disagree with, becoming compliant and easy-going to manage it all.

    I also developed an ability to rise above my circumstances. It was a form of dissociation, but it also had a quality of spiritual transcendence that I came into this world with and which I treasured secretly in the profane environment of school. More on this later.

    Sometimes being this way left me not knowing in circumstances where I felt lost, even in danger. Situations when I became a victim to others’ ability to take charge and dominate me, when I was unable to step away and make clear decisions to protect my integrity, my autonomy and my welfare.

    This dynamic has followed me through life and I have actually made positive use of it; but I also lost other important aspects of being a rounded personality: my ability to speak out on behalf of myself and others, my ability to feel and express anger, outrage, heartfelt passion and compassion. I have failed to surrender fully in relationship, unable to love deeply and unconditionally.

    In childhood I had created the feeling of living with a wall of protection around myself that kept me safe but separate, protected but often not able to see enough of what was going on outside my castle walls.

    As I have got older, I have at least found a door to the outside world, but inside my castle walls I can remain vague and hidden, I can avoid having to take a stand on things, make decisions that would require me to step up and take responsibility. In this state it remains easier to hold back and let other people around me assess situations, take the initiative and risk the consequences, so that I don’t have to.

    I have feared getting it wrong through not knowing enough, not being able to see what is required, and make poor or wrong decisions. I have preferred to live and stay small, rather than take the risk of being decisive and in doing so, failing or leaving myself exposed.

    A male figure I carved in my twenties that shows his potential power and yet he is humble and submissive in kneeling to a greater power.

    In spite of all this, I have come to see how much life experience combined with the variety of skills I have developed, have put me in a position with others, especially younger people, where I do realise I know more, see more clearly with a wider view, or offer a more efficient way to go about things. Out of my wounded self, I have developed a quiet wisdom and a still presence that people often appreciate.

    Yet my ability to acknowledge and honour myself in this way has been slow. The old patterns of self-effacing doubt, lack of self-belief, and my persistent fear of getting it wrong, (the destructive result of childhood trauma at school) have all been contributing factors. I recall a time when I made the telling statement:

    ‘I would rather be a blank page than be misread and misunderstood by others.’

    I see people around me making mistakes on a regular basis. I can see it is normal to be able to acknowledge failure, admit the error, apologise to others if necessary and then smoothly move on to the next decision.

    But something inside me resists responding in this way. Something or someone insists that I have to get things right or not go there at all. Better to stay silent, because to get something wrong is somehow shameful and humiliating. On top of this, I am not allowed to change my mind, to change my decision. Once announced, I have to stick with my pronouncement whatever the cost.

    This is nonsense of course, and I can only assume that it is a very young, immature self in me who operates by these simplistic rules. It is also, of course, the root of stubborn pride which is an inculturated distortion of the masculine.

    So in fact ‘not knowing’ has several aspects:

    There is the confusion of being ‘left behind’, not knowing what is going on or what is expected, with a vague but genuine sense of danger around daring to ask, which then creates a sense of being trapped in a world of isolated unknowing and an accompanying risk of making mistakes.

    Then there is the not knowing of convenience, where ignorance is preferable, so that we can feel justified in not being able to come forward with a clear opinion or decision about something. Sitting on the fence, staying safe, even though it leads to disempowerment.

    On the other hand there is the more positive aspect of being able to be with not knowing, in order to hold paradox, or to tune in to people and situations in a more intuitive way. It is a feminine quality as opposed to the more masculine quality of decisiveness.

    This aspect needs expanding, as it is an important part of the picture. As young children we all have the ability to tune in and sense what is going on, without knowing the facts of a situation. It is our unconscious instinct for survival. I have remained open to this channel, as many of us do into our adult years, often sensing what is going on in situations without being aware of it consciously.

    This is another aspect of how we instinctively keep ourselves safe of course, but in other ways too. It is the basis of our ability to feel compassion, to know what others are feeling or needing in the moment. Reading energy is a valuable and necessary skill in therapeutic situations and I use this ability in my work as a counsellor.

    Lastly and perhaps most importantly of all, I want to discuss the subject of uncertainty:

    We are moving into very uncertain times in every aspect of life. It shows up in politics, job security, the damage to the environment, weather patterns, health etc. It is as if the very planetary systems are in trauma as a result of human greed and ignorance. The planet’s trauma, which is revealing itself now in so many ways, is a reflection of our individual disfunction and pain, and leaves us exposed to unpredictable change. It is a known fact that the most distressing aspects of the trauma suffered by people with PTSD is the uncertainty of their predicament. In order for the planet to heal, it is vital that we own and address our personal traumas.

    Uncertainty about the future makes us less capable of coping with negative events when they happen and disables us from taking efficient and effective steps to avoid them in our helplessness.

    Uncertainty is often a major feature of the ‘dark night of the soul’. The great mystics of all traditions who have survived this terrible journey tell us that, faced with a dark night, we have only one resource: to remain in a state of radical unknowing. This will have two effects; it will crucify the ego’s perpetual hunger for certainty, and it will open us with humility to the guidance that can only come when we are willing to surrender to a higher power, with no preconceptions.

    I find it difficult to trust and surrender in many situations, but there have been times in my life when I feel stuck without enough information or confidence to make a big decision. Yet, once I have surrendered to the waiting and not-knowing in which I find myself, a clear sense of direction has come to me as an inner knowing of what is right for my soul’s path, sometimes difficult and painful to follow, but always bringing a sense of relief and rightness.

    There are still many situations where the demand to respond in the moment, to step up, to risk being at odds with someone, will leave me paralysed, dumb struck, literally unable to speak, in a panic of irrational fear left over from childhood. But when I am able to back up my sense of clarity on something, where I can see I have more experience, knowledge or wisdom, and I do speak my truth or give my advice in a decisive way, I feel more clearly seen by others, more empowered, more honoured, as I assert my place in the world through what is revealed, whether it is attributable to my practical skills, my aesthetic taste, my rational brain, my mystical beliefs, my values, or my wisdom.

    I have reached the stage of my life in which struggling to find meaning and purpose doesn’t have such a grip on me as it used to and I come back to enjoying the simpler things, living in the moment.

    Writer Joan Tollifson calls it ‘living in groundlessness’. She says: “here-now we always are, and right here, there is the utter simplicity and wonder of life itself—the sounds of rain, the freshness of the air, the ache of grief, the taste and texture of this moment, just exactly as it is. And it never stays the same, for everything is always changing. The universe literally begins anew in each moment. And really, this moment is all we have….. “ She describes how she has given up her search to avoid groundlessness, uncertainty, vulnerability, lack of control, and the reality of not knowing, in a kind of surrender to WHAT IS, that brings a simpler but more complete kind of satisfaction and contentment.

    I am coming to realise the quality and benefits of not knowing in this simple and yet profound sense. Can we ever know and understand the complexities and mysteries of life, of other people, of ourselves? Only by surrendering to the un-knowing can we hope to touch the wonder and beauty of all that is.

  • Building a Peaceful Economy – by Judy Wicks

    When attending meetings with peace and justice activists, I often find myself the only business person in the room. Inevitably, someone makes a comment about the evils of business, or greedy capitalists, or some other negative comment that implies business people are the enemy.

    I couldn’t agree more about the harm done by profit-driven multinational corporations, but what about businesspeople like me who are working to build a new economy, one that is more just and sustainable?

    Because they view all business in a negative light, many activists don’t seem to think it matters where they spend their money. This experience showed me the wide gap that exists between the peace and justice movement and the local economy movement. Just think how much more powerful we would be in changing the world for the better if we worked together to build a peace economy.

    Our Economic Choices Have Consequences

    Most economic transactions we make in our daily lives ultimately contribute toward building a peace economy or a war economy, a world of compassion and well being, or a world of indifference and violence. Have you ever imagined that we consumers have such power? Likely not.

    Materialism teaches us simply to spend without thinking. But there are consequences to our everyday economic decisions that cumulatively build an economic system that has tremendous impact on other people, and our entire planet.

    Materialism and militarism are closely related. Along with racism they form the giant triple evils that Dr. King called upon us to defeat. Each of the three leads us toward cruelty and war, and each depends on a complacent citizenry. By becoming informed about the impact of our decisions and learning to use our economic power mindfully we have the ability to co-create an economy that works for all and bring into being the world we want to live in—one that is healthy, just and peaceful.

    Protecting Corporate Interests

    Since the rise of colonialism, the global economy has been built on exploitation of indigenous populations and their natural resources, and continues today under the guise of economic development. Profit-driven transnational corporations with a grow-or-die mandate have an ever-expanding need for more and more natural resources, cheap labor and new markets in which to sell their products. As nation-states have done throughout history, the U.S. government deploys our military, or its surrogates, to ensure access for U.S. corporations, whether it’s oil in the Middle East, cheap labor in Central America or new markets in Asia.

    “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” quipped Thomas Friedman. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.”

    Not only do they use the fist of the military to protect their interests, these powerful corporations also wield alarming control over most important aspects of our daily lives: the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the news we hear, and even the government we rely on to protect the interests of its citizens.

    Where does corporate power come from? We consumers hand it over when we purchase their products, deposit our money in their banks and invest in them through the stock market. It would be one thing if these corporations had our best interests in mind, but they too often make decisions to increase short-term profits, with little regard for the long-term impact on people and planet.

    Numbed by pervasive advertising that equates happiness with consumption, citizens are often oblivious to the harm being done by our corporate-controlled global economic system. Meanwhile, we are losing our freedom to corporate control, creating the conditions for continuous war and the destruction of the natural systems that support life on Earth.

    Another Economy Is Possible

    There is an alternative to corporate domination and the violence and ruin it brings. By building a new global economy in which every community has food and water security and locally produced renewable energy, we can create the foundation for world peace. The British economist and author of Small Is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher, puts it simply: “People who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.”

    Don’t be overwhelmed by the enormity of rebuilding our global economy. Begin at home in your own community. Working together, local entrepreneurs, conscientious consumers and local governments can build regional economies that produce food, clothing, building materials, renewable energy and other supplies locally, using fair and sustainable practices.

    Decreasing our dependency on corporations increases opportunities for local ownership and meaningful job creation. Locally owned businesses hire local workers and purchase their supplies and services from other local businesses to produce the products needed by their communities.

    Excess production can be exported to other communities and products not available locally can be imported through fair trade relationships that provide a living wage in the communities where the products originated.

    We can develop products unique to our region for exchange in the global marketplace, be it a fashion design, fine wine or cheese, works of art and music, or an entrepreneurial innovation. In this way, we can connect to other local economies through win-win economic exchange, and gradually build a new global economy; one that is a network of sustainable and just local economies.

    The Localism Movement

    Over the past 15 years, the modern-day local economy movement has grown and strengthened. It is supported by nationwide organizations, but primarily catalyzed by countless local efforts dedicated to building regional food systems and supporting local manufacturers and retailers.

    Maybe there is an effort underway in your own community that you could help support. “Think Local First” campaigns encourage citizens to buy first from local businesses, which keeps money circulating within local economies rather than be siphoned off by a corporation, which is what happens when you shop at chain stores. Shopping local is even more impactful when local retailers sell products that are grown or manufactured locally.

    Consumers can become producers by leaving corporate jobs and starting businesses needed by our communities and by making products to sell or use at home in the growing do-it-yourself and makers movements. Decentralizing business ownership moves economic power from distant boardrooms to our own communities, increasing community wealth and strengthening our democracy.

    Climate change adds urgency to the need for a local economy movement. Environmentally sustainable local production of our basic needs reduces the amount of carbon from shipping that is contributing to climate change. It also prepares our communities for the consequences of climate disruption, so that we are not reliant on supply chains that can be affected by extreme weather, social instability, rising fuel costs, and fluctuating prices in the global marketplace.

    The localism movement is not only a peace movement, it is also a pro-democracy movement. Though U.S. citizens fear centralized state control, we often neglect to see that centralized corporate power is the other side of the same coin. Today, the collusion of corporate and state power threatens our democracy. Lobbying and unbridled campaign finance by corporations and the very wealthy has resulted in policies that support corporate control. Getting money out of politics is crucial to saving our democracy.

    Ultimately, the localist movement seeks to build a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that support just and democratic societies and meet the basic needs of all the world’s people while protecting and restoring the local ecosystems on which our lives depend.

    The Role of Fair Trade

    When goods are not available locally, such as coffee, tea, spices, sugar, or bananas, fair trade importers offer local retailers the opportunity to stock their shelves with products that are certified fair trade to insure that workers make a living wage in the communities where products originate. Some of the most egregious violations of workers’ rights, including modern-day slavery and child labor, take place in developing countries where U.S. corporations seek low-cost production of food and textiles. The chocolate industry, for instance, is notorious for using slaves to grow cocoa beans in Africa.

    Local Energy Security

    Oil is the life-blood of corporate globalization. It is important for both environmental reasons and equality to wean ourselves off using fossil fuels to power our homes and vehicles, and to build energy security based on locally produced renewables such as solar and wind. Reputable scientists now all agree that burning fossil fuels, mainly coal, oil and natural gas, is the root cause of climate change.

    Sources for oil and gas are no longer easily accessible. More drastic and dangerous methods of extraction are being used such as deep-sea oil drilling and fracking for natural gas. Increasing numbers of oil spills are devastating coastal populations from the tropics to the arctic, killing untold numbers of birds, fish and other sea life and disrupting natural systems.

    Fracking for natural gas has poisoned local aquifers in mostly poor, rural communities and disrupted life with loud equipment and heavy trucks on country roads. To protect the most vulnerable and to keep the planet viable for future generations, we must all work to break our addiction to oil and gas and move to a low-carbon lifestyle. In most states, there is the option to switch electric providers to buy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydro and biomass, rather than coal, gas, oil and nuclear. No matter how the electricity is generated, the electrons are mixed together in the grid and delivered through the wires of the local electric utility company, so no rewiring is needed.

    Another option is rooftop solar installations. These supply renewable electricity directly to a household rather than through the grid. There are programs available in many communities to partially or fully fund the installation of solar panels through grants or loans. Solar installations pay for themselves over time. After paying off loans for the installation, households can actually make money by selling excess solar-produced electricity to the grid to be used elsewhere.

    Phasing out natural gas and oil and relying totally on sustainably produced electricity to heat, cool and run our households and vehicles is the path to a planet-saving lifestyle. Additionally, when we stop buying oil, gas and coal, we are shifting economic power from concentrated wealth to broadly distributed wealth and power. “Green power to the people” has two meanings!

    The first step toward energy savings is to make sure our homes are well insulated and that doors and windows are not drafty. Having an energy audit is a good first step. In many communities, there are services for low-income communities to provide assistance in weatherizing homes and increasing energy efficiency.

    Slowing down and changing our means of transportation is another important way to gain energy security and address climate change. Using public transportation, biking, walking or driving an electric car run on renewably generated electricity, as well as limiting or ending air travel, are important ways to eliminate carbons.

    As Pope Francis points out, climate change is most harmful to the world’s poor and disproportionately to people of color. Many populations which rely directly on farming and fishing are seeing their livelihoods be disrupted by droughts, storms and new climate-induced infestations of destructive insects and disease.

    The disaster in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is a good example. Without the resources to move from areas of rising sea levels and flooding rivers and rebuild after increasingly extreme and destructive weather patterns, the world’s poor are bearing the brunt of catastrophic climate change.

    Local Food Security

    Across the globe, farmland is being confiscated from indigenous farmers by corporations who impose an industrial system of monocrops, chemical fertilizers, toxic pesticides and hideously cruel animal factories that destroy rural communities, degrade the soil, and pollute the air and water. Food bred for long shelf life on these industrial farms is less flavorful and nutritious than locally and sustainably raised fruits and vegetables grown for immediate consumption. Meat and poultry from animal factories contain unhealthy drugs and hormones and come from animals who endure unspeakable deprivation and pain.

    Developing a sustainable regional food system is vital to taking economic control of our daily lives. The local food movement is gaining strength in the effort to decentralize our food system so that small, diversified farmers, who are proper stewards of the land and farm animals, feed their local communities. A growing number of communities now have access to local farm markets and stores that offer fruits, vegetables, and humanely produced meat, dairy and eggs from local farms.

    The consumer’s role is crucial in this effort to build regional food security. Rather than buying food from chain stores and restaurants, it is important to spend our dollars at farmers’ markets and locally owned stores and restaurants supplied by local farms whenever possible so that the local farms and food enterprises can increase their capacity.

    In many communities, CSAs—Community Supported Agriculture—are available. These are programs where households invest in farms in the springtime and receive a box of fruit and vegetable every week during the growing season. Food cooperatives owned by consumers provide lower-cost groceries and usually include local produce and fair trade products.

    Consumers are also becoming food producers. In urban areas, food is grown in containers and raised beds, on rooftops and in community gardens where land is shared among multiple households. In the suburbs, lawns are being transformed into gardens.

    Economically viable urban farms use raised-beds and hydroponics on once vacant land—often brownfields contaminated by former industry—to feed a neighborhood and supply local restaurants and stores. This also provides job opportunities to inner city residents. Consumers are becoming entrepreneurs, starting small food enterprises that turn local produce into pickles, sauces, soups, jams and jellies, canned fruits and vegetables, energy bars, and many other products that can be consumed year-round. Milk from local grassfed cows, sheep and goats is being used to make cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

    Local Water Security

    Struggles over control of clean water are increasing across the globe. Because of pollution and misuse, as well as increasing droughts, clean water is becoming scarce in many places and is expected to someday be more valuable than oil. In many communities there are battles over who controls the water: a corporation or the public. Of course, when corporations gain control, the cost of water to citizens goes up to increase corporate profits rather than sustain a public utility.

    In some communities, aquifers that supply local drinking water are being drained by bottled water and soda companies or by corporations to irrigate mega-farms or cool nuclear reactors. In the U.S., tap water is regulated and inspected by local government, while bottled water is not. Studies have found tap water to contain fewer contaminants than bottled water.

    Citizens can help by joining local fights to preserve public ownership of water. But on a daily basis we can all make a difference by using tap water in reusable bottles rather than buying bottled water or sodas. Bottled water and soda not only increase the waste of plastic and aluminum containers and burn carbons by shipping liquids long distances, but they also increase corporate control of water.

    The soda industry is immensely profitable to corporations while providing an unhealthy and in some cases addictive product to consumers, adding to the epidemics of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

    Sustainable Clothing

    The fashion industry is one of the world’s worst polluters due to the use of toxic dyes and fabrics produced with extensive use of pesticides. The industry is also known for sweatshops and egregious labor practices. Shopping at locally owned boutiques that carry locally made and sustainable clothing is ideal. For communities that don’t have such boutiques there are some responsible manufacturers who sell fair trade, sustainably produced fashion nationwide.

    Clothing swaps and shopping at thrift stores for pre-owned clothing is not only less expensive but better for the environment. Wearing homemade and thrift shop clothing is a fashion statement admired among localists and environmentalists. Americans recycle only 15% of our used clothing and toss 10.5 million tons into the landfill, yet we continue to buy more and more clothing. Let’s start by buying less and save our money to buy locally and sustainably made.

    Banking and Investing

    When we invest in local businesses, we get not only a financial return, but also a living return: the benefit of living in a more sustainable and healthy community. When we invest in the stock market, we are perpetuating a system driven by profit that is increasing inequality and environmental destruction.

    Publicly traded mega banks have enormous power, draining capital from local communities that could be invested locally. Banking through local banks and credit unions strengthens local borrowing power and keeps banking profits local. Some communities have community reinvestment funds that provide a vehicle for local investment in small businesses, affordable housing, wind turbines and other community needs.

    In recent years, crowdsourcing through online vehicles such as Kiva Zip have allowed for investments as small as $5 to support small local businesses. A growing number of local investment clubs have provided a vehicle for community members to invest collectively in local businesses through loans or capital investments with risk shared by the group.

    Reduce, Reuse, recycle

    Consumerism encourages us to buy things we don’t need. One of the first steps in living sustainably is to buy less. Think twice before making a purchase to determine if it is necessary.

    The next most important step is to reuse products multiple times. For instance, wood harvested from demolition sites can be reused in new construction and renovations. Similarly, textiles can be reused to make new clothing, slipcovers or curtains.

    When we must throw something away, it’s important to recycle as much as possible. Most communities have programs to recycle paper, aluminum, plastic, and even electronics. It’s important to sort these materials carefully and put them out for pick up.

    Composting fruit and vegetable food waste is an important part of the food cycle, which returns nutrients to the soil. Putting food waste into plastic trash bags destined for the landfill is a waste of this valuable resource. Many communities have compost pickup and it is also possible to do one’s own composting for use in home gardens.

    A Revolution of Values

    In 1967, when Dr. King expressed concern about the triple evils of materialism, militarism and racism, he suggested that we need a “revolution of values” to defeat them.

    In our society, we continue to measure success in both business and in our individual careers largely by money and accumulation of material possessions. To build a peace economy, we must change our measurement of success to value life above money. Localists measure success not by continual material growth, but by the growth of healthy communities and ecosystems.

    When we make economic decisions, rather than focusing on getting the cheapest price when we buy, the highest price when we sell, or the largest return on our investments, we must ask ourselves how those decisions will ultimately effect what we care about most—our communities, our natural world, our democracy, our children’s future.

    In the business world, measuring success not simply by profits, but by the impact a business has on the lives of people and nature is often referred to as the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. Rather than maximizing profits, triple-bottom-line businesses maximize relationships with all the stakeholders – employees, customers, suppliers, community members and the natural world.

    Localism is moving our economy from a competitive mindset to a cooperative one, from measuring success by how much we have to how much we share, and from a feeling of loneliness and despair to the joy of community. Ultimately, we are moving from “me to we” by embracing a worldview of interconnection and love rather than one of separation and fear.

    Co-ops

    An important vehicle for cooperation and sharing are cooperatively owned businesses, which include worker cooperatives that are often manufacturing businesses, consumer cooperatives typical of food co-ops, and producer cooperatives such as farmer or artisan cooperatives.

    Land ownership is a crucial issue in building a new economy and cooperatively owned land or community land trusts provide a means for people to own farms or housing when they cannot afford the cost of land. Some cities are forming land banks to provide land for small businesses and affordable housing. Also rural and suburban areas are offering land preserved for open space to young farmers who cannot afford the high cost of buying farmland.

    Natural resources such as clean air and water are part of the commons that we must protect by enforcing existing environmental laws too often disregarded by powerful corporations. The cultural commons includes publicly owned art and cultural sights that are part of our common heritage and must also be protected from profiteering.

    Adopting Gandhi’s Strategy

    The strategy Gandhi used in his nonviolent revolution to overthrow British tyranny is a good one for overthrowing corporate tyranny in today’s world. The conditions are similar. When India was colonized by the British, all the fields were planted with cash crops for export. As a result, the Indian people lost their food security and millions starved to death.

    Gandhi told the people of India to plant community gardens so that villages could feed themselves. He also suggested they spin their own textiles. Rather than ship the Indian-grown flax and cotton off to London to be made into clothing and then shipped back for the Indian people to buy, they could make their own clothing within their local economy.

    While the British believed in centralized, industrialized and mechanized modes of production. Gandhi envisioned a decentralized, homegrown, handcrafted mode of production. In his words, “Not mass production, but production by the masses.” He said mass production is only concerned with the product, whereas production by the masses is concerned with the product, the producers and the process.

    Gandhi’s vision for a decentralized, small-scale economic structure in India comprised of interconnected self-reliant villages governed by participatory democracy is one we can work toward today. In this sense, Gandhi is the grandfather of the modern-day localist movement.

    Gandhi knew that with the globalization of the economy, countries would go to war to protect their economic interests—military war as well as economic war. He said we cannot have real peace in the world if we look at each other’s countries as sources for raw materials or as markets for finished industrial goods. “There is enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for anybody’s greed,” said Gandhi.

    Where do we begin?

    Like the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Gandhi’s salt march, social change begins with non-cooperation with the existing system. Once you make the choice to stop cooperating with the system you find immoral, you can begin to build an alternative.

    Everyone of us can start with something we care most about – refusing to eat meat produced in factory farms, refusing to buy clothes made in sweatshops, refusing to buy chocolate that uses slave labor, refusing to buy dirty energy. Once we make a commitment to stop cooperating with a system we oppose, we can begin to build a new one that expresses the values we care most about.

    When we decentralize our economy, beginning with our food and energy systems, we decentralize ownership, wealth and power. Decentralization creates more owners. The more owners the more equality.

    By working collaboratively, the peace and justice movement and the local business movement can build a new economy that serves all of us, while protecting our natural environment. Cooperation, generosity, and compassion for one another, as well as for other species, will assure our survival in a world at peace.

    Judy Wicks is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and mentor working to build a more compassionate, environmentally sustainable and locally based economy. http://www.Judywicks.com