Body wisdom, peace, systems failure. Opportunities?
She considers the term "to regulate"...I think of it as coping strategies.
In Norway, the FB page Girl God Books by Ailey Jolie offers this as well!
"You cannot breathe your way out of patriarchy. You cannot cold plunge your way out of structural oppression. You cannot meditate, journal, or yoga your way out of conditions that were designed to dysregulate you.
This is not to say that nervous system regulation tools aren't valuable. They are. I use them. I teach them. I believe in the body's capacity to settle, to find ground, to return to itself.
But when regulation tools are offered as the solution to chronic activation without naming the cause of that activation, they become a form of gaslighting. They locate the problem in your body rather than in the conditions your body is responding to.
O'Keeffe
The message becomes: if you're still anxious, you haven't tried hard enough. If you're still activated, you haven't found the right technique. If you're still struggling, the failure is yours.
But what if your nervous system isn't broken? What if it's accurate?
What if your chronic activation is a correct response to living in a world where your body has never been fully safe? Where your rights can be legislated away? Where your value has been tied to your appearance, your compliance, your ability to serve? Where violence against women is endemic and normalized. Where the mental load is invisible and unpaid and never ending?
You're not dysregulated because you're doing something wrong. You're dysregulated because your body is reading the environment correctly.
What if your body's activation is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be witnessed? What if the shaking, the racing heart, the inability to settle is your body saying: this is not okay. This was never okay.
And I refuse to pretend it is.
There's a reason oppressed peoples have always used the body as a site of protest. The body that refuses to be calm is a body that refuses to comply. The body that stays activated is a body that is telling the truth about what it has survived.
I'm not saying don't regulate. I'm saying regulate with your eyes open. Know what you're regulating for. Notice if your regulation practice is helping you show up more fully for your life, or if it's helping you tolerate conditions you'd be better off changing or leaving.
There's a difference between settling your nervous system so you can be present and settling your nervous system so you can continue to be extracted from.
One is healing. The other is sophisticated dissociation.
Your body knows things. It knows what's safe and what isn't. It knows what's sustainable and what's depleting. It knows when you're in the wrong relationship, the wrong job, the wrong room.
The question is not how do I make my body stop reacting. The question is what is my body trying to tell me that I haven't been willing to hear.
Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is not calm down. Sometimes the most radical thing is to let your body speak. To let it be a witness. To refuse to regulate yourself into compliance with conditions that are slowly killing you.
Although you cannot breathe your way out of patriarchy, you can listen to the body that has been registering its impact all along."
—Ailey Jolie
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See my earlier blog about systems failures by Rebecca Traister. This will be a recurring theme for me I think!
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How does non-violent protest work? It's got a long history...from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, to Starhawk to the Women's Marches, to the Buddhist Monks Walk for Peace, to the Minneapolis ICE OUT protests.
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Systems thinking...
When thinking about something in a systems way, I look to see if the problem that is current might be a result of the system behind it.
For instance, a recent comparison of two CAT Scans of my lungs felt like I wasn't getting good information. Were they ok? Were they having a problem that could be addressed? My status was supposed to be clarified by this test of 400 pictures of slices of my lungs.
But the radiological report compared today's test to my last one, taken when I was hospitalized with pneumonia in last September. At that time the radiological report said it wasn't clear which spots were part of my Bronchiectasis or were from pneumonia. Fast forward to today's report, where again it is concluded there might be a bacteriological cause of the spots. Recommendation to get a sputum test to send to a lab and see if I should again take an antibiotic.
No they didn't use the term spots.
But I got to see what the CAT scans looked like, and my Dr. showed me an earlier set from 2020 just after I'd completed a respiratory rehab after my cardio rehab. So 6 years ago my lungs didn't have the obvious little white feathery tendrils all over the place. Now I could tell that my healthier lungs did indeed look quite different than currently.
The problem with the first comparison is a system problem. Radiologists have followed a procedure set up in the system, which is flawed when comparing a patient's pictures from sick to sicker ones. They make their conclusions based on this.
To solve the problem and obtain more accurate information could be simple, by just adding a suffix to the records of the letter "s" to indicate the patient was sick. Or something similar. Of course the radiologists don't know if the person is sick, so that would be up to someone who sent the patient for the test (a Dr. probably.)
If I hadn't been there to tell the Dr. that the pictures from last September weren't good ones to compare (because of being sick at the time) he would have thought I was always walking around with these spots. I thought he was comparing apples to oranges, and giving me no useful information.
Anyway, that's a simplified way to say a system doesn't work the way it was designed to.
In order for me to think of a system, and look for a solution there, rather than to consider the radiologist was stupid - I think of Barry Stevens' explanation of playing cards.
There are rules of play. Then there are conventions. To win, one must play by the rules. But to win often one has certain conventions that help, like looking at the discards of the opponents and figuring out what cards they might have in their hand.
The rules are the system of the game. They also are the procedures that a radiologist goes through in writing his/her conclusions. As well as how the Dr. explains them to the patient.
The conventions are unspoken rules, which govern much of society on a broad level. This is how a system exists which might be invisible. But everyone understands that it exists. The convention my Dr. used was to scan back until he found a CAT result which was clear, to compare to today's condition.
Now what systems do you notice might need something better happening for it to work?
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Thank you, Barbara, I so appreciate your way of thinking! Yes, the Human Rights Declaration is essential. There is much wisdom in our constitutional democracy but it has been bought by the wealthy and must be renewed. Yes, love and wisdom as the foundation for new systems. Doughnut Economics has much to offer. Integral thinking, social artistry, group facilitation, mindfulness practices also. Also, creating islands of sanity and care at the local level.
. . . Let's keep this dialogue going!