You beingest babe. You marvel of creation. You myth in progress, raveling and unraveling life's mysteries with the fine spindle of knowing. You divine expression of unbound creation, exploding with unique facets like the finest gem.
You are the medicine.
When you:
Rewild!
Rewild. Rewild. Rewild.
Upskill. Upskill. Upskill.
Rewild. Rewild. Rewild.
Heal. Heal. Heal.
Fortify. Fortify. Fortify.
Tonify. Tonify. Tonify.
Scatter. Shed. and Send.
Listen. Know. and Mend.
Let free our wild souls again.
Rewild. Rewild. Rewild.
🕯️Rewild! Chant - by Fractal Praxis🕯️
Bless Us! (with Right Relationship)
When you enact right relationship: harmony and eudemony (the overall measure of a system's thriving) is bound to increase.
💙🫶🪷🧑🏿🤝🧑🏻RSVP now for the next Holisma mass🧑🏿🤝🧑🏻🪷🫶💙
Coming up on Sunday June 11th at 4:44 at Shared Ground. The theme is RIGHT RELATIONSHIP! This is the fifth event of six in the series. Free and open to all, by donation. Don't miss out!
What is Right Relationship?
Right Relationship is an idea rooted in indigenous worldviews, about how we can entrain ourselves to living in appropriate, skillful, respectful relations with other people and all the creatures of our biosphere. This is the prevailing concept of Right Relationship (capitalized) in the circles I run in (example: Right Relationship Boulder).
However, I was even younger when I was exposed to the idea of "right action" in the study of Buddhism. Right action implies the power to take appropriate action, using the exact right amount of energy, and not generating any karma (or harm, caused by ignorance) in the process.
These ideas relate, in my mind. Right action (and the other form of "rightness" enumerated in the eightfold noble path of Buddhism)—and, frankly, the notion that we can stop karma from proliferating—strongly implies a development process, involving both knowledge and artfulness, of coming into right relationship with all the different energies and forms of the universe.
To achieve right relationship, it is necessary for one to practice systems thinking, whether indigenous or acquired. Systems thinking asks: how do all parts belong and intertwine to form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts?
YOU are a biological system of microorganisms and coordinated electrical activity and such. You are also dependent upon a web of creation that seamlessly supplies you with air, water, food, family, etc.
As Thich Nhat Hahn addresses with his articulation of Interbeing: in what ways are you NOT the drop of dew on the grass outside, or the baby rabbits nearby snug in their den, if you actually rely upon these phenomena for your simultaneous existence?
Right relationship, for most of us who have descended from shattered and/or assimilated lineages, requires relearning. Right relationship is the stark difference in orientation and praxis between:
- living ON the world and living WITH (or better yet, WITHIN) the world.
- objectifying the world (making beings and self into lifeless objects) and subjectifying the world (making beings and self into living subjects).
- identifying oneself as a standalone individual agent, steering his life story like a ship, against the backdrop of "the environment"... and attuning to one's myriad, entangled relations—from subtle to gross, from big to small—out of a profound sense of kinship, gratitude, and duty.
Dear reader, as a fellow inheritor of a specific oppressive lineage—a supremacist, colonialist and imperialist culture, justified in its own twisted logic as benevolent, that has aggressively reshaped global peoples and landscapes in just a few hundred years—we are overdue to re-learn and re-condition ourselves to these basic truths.
This is about how to live skillfully, adeptly, with the patterning that encompasses us. Even if that means breaking the form of inherited molds and norms. Because perhaps our normal is violent. If so, we must reorganize ourselves—minds, bodies, and all our relations—out of necessity of both surviving and thriving.
A colonizing, oppressive culture requires myths of supremacy for its very existence. Power-over, and abusive hierarchies, are assumed. Rich and multifaceted relationship praxis suffers erasure and is replaced by an ethos of domination.
In Fractal Praxis, we suggest that the work of repairing our root patterning and becoming more adaptive is fractal. Because this work is fractal: Yes, we can start anywhere, and the effective patterning has the potential to regrow itself and permeate other areas of our lives. To relearn how to be in nuanced and respectful relationship with other people, or with the fellow biological inhabitants of your home place, maybe practice expanding your capacities to listen and witness and transform as a result of all of you—to trust that every part of you has some wisdom to offer.
Fractal Praxis also proclaims that the domains of mind, myths, society, and culture are not exempt from right relationship. In Fractal Praxis there's a notion of arranging our ideas (our maps 🗺️ of the world) into right relationship with our realities, inner and outer. Yes, some ideas are more adaptive to believe in, meaning: to wield certain ideas gives us more play, more power, more regenerativity, and more traction in navigating real phenomena. We can curate our belief systems and their structures through a devoted evolutionary praxis—investing our belief-energy into that which gives us good feedback (is adaptive) and is elegant—and disbelieving, or retraining the mind to deemphasize and eventually dismiss less-effective ideas, that are waste energy, or are even harmful to believe. This requires a discipline of a conscious practitioner.
As a final exploration of this theme, let's consider this lens: Right relationship to your true self.
Your "true self" is the most wholistic, liberated, and capable version of yourself. The person you "are meant to be" in this life. The expression of your ancestors' dreams, and your own dreams and potentials.
Is it even possible to live a fulfilled life without being in "right relationship" to your innermost purpose?
Allowing this "true self" to come through your body, your form, your soul, in this lifetime, is another way of describing a path of liberation. Allowing your "true self" and no other version or variation of your "self" to define your destiny is the most profound choice possible. Putting yourself fully in your Self's hands is a form of relinquishing and surrender reflecting the greatest spiritual experience possible.
"Self" with a capital-S is a term I learned many years ago, to refer to the whole set of wise systems which constitute your unique existence as a sovereign being. Thus "Self" is the greater "self" of universe / God / Gaia that is encompassing your "little self" of a separate human ego and organism at all times. The Self is big enough to know you and to guide you. When we let go of our little sense of self, our identity as a separate, small, unique human being, we can give ourselves more and more over to big Self to be guided.
What follows is an offering, an invocation—designed not to explain or reason, but to cut through and penetrate a deeper layer of existence. This is a piece I wrote for me, and now offer to you, invoking the moment when it's time to cross the threshhold and commit to acting from Self over self.
Get Big!
Here is a set of invocations designed to unleash you from limiting self-beliefs. If any part of these words call to you, I urge you to speak them aloud, repeating them as much as desired, each time with the intention that they come true. May these messages' magic ripen in your world!
🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️
For the healing I’ve drawn from this mystic discourse,
Let it be put to the healing of all.
No more hoarding the secret treasure.
Let I touch my medicine
as you touch yours
Let me kill the ways
-- my body remembers fearing, retreating, and flinching;
-- reacting to their ignorance with self-doubt;
-- forgetting myself
Let me not fear ignorance — nor compound it
To run from possibly causing harm (by ignorance)
is to turn my back on the potential to catalyze healing.
Take the risk of causing a little pain for a lot more love.
Take the risks required of saving someone’s soul
as though they were your beloved, wholly.
No more will I cow to their insecure reactions, imploring my smallness.
I will remain Big, as an invitation to them to become Big themselves.
Creative expression is divine testimony
and means to re-dignifying the world.
Big of Heart! Big of Mind!
Expansive spirit. Resounding spaciousness.
Omnipotent & omniscient as God
Know less, i will.
I release a life lived for seeking others’ validation
—for no one can validate me for where i’m going. No one. So:
retire the hesitation.
retire the indecision.
retire the grasping.
retire the doubt.
retire the smallness.
They need your Empowerment.
They need your medicine.
Even those caught unawares,
will be able to taste it on their tongues,
in their throats, or in their rattling bones.
May none who pass within your reach
proceed on without a taste, at least.
Your Bigness is nobody’s insult.
It is a song to God.
Your embodiment, a proof of Goddess.
Go beyond small mind, with its rationales for smallness, its foolish reactions.
And this may you cause in kind, in others.
Until the world is replete
with the fruits of Buddha nature.
🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️
Go On!
I am wishing you a summer filled with nature's embrace and the embrace of nature. May your pleasure, wonder and abundance overflow. May your kinship deepen and multiply.
May you also please come and join any of Fractal Praxis' calendar offerings as you're able. Offerings are stewing and brewing, but none (besides the last two Holisma masses) are on the calendar yet. Yet you can trust, they will emerge, about as fluidly as life drips by when lived fully alive.
Stay hip, stay broad, stay wise, sweeten up, love you, see you soon.
Your friend in dharma,
C.
