Writing Life Together

Neuroscience tells us recognition is important for how our brains grow. What parts of yourself do you need to name and recognize? What parts of yourself would you like to ask others to recognize? How is recognition part of growth and healing and flourishing into all the aspects of who we are and why we are here?

How can feminist writing practices help us get closer to the knowledge inside ourself that is both powerful and entwined within deep grief labor? And how do we learn to hold that process as it unfolds? What changes in ourselves and our relationships along the way?

Self-care is useful as a coping mechanism, but it's also an attempt at an individual solution to a problem that has deep, systemic roots. i talk about identifying our needs and deprivations, as well as the abundant resources of various kinds that we have to circulate to others as feminist practice. 

One of the reasons people fear change in the feminist journey is because challenging patriarchy usually is not profitable! I talk in this episode about what it means to build alternative community structures that support the change of the feminist journey.

Often, we unconsciously block our next steps of healing because we fear the ripple effects of our changing. But the feminist journey is about change—so it is important to be able to consider and name our fears of change and breathe into those places inside ourself and our relationships. This episode gives some context for thinking about change at the intersection of personal and social-cultural systems.

This podcast engages across trauma studies to consider Gloria Anzaldua's writing on healing: "You don't heal the wound. The wound heals you." I also discuss mind-body connection and the deep anxiety many people have to be/dwell consciously within the sensations and feelings of their own bodies.

This episode furthers the discussion in my July 16 blog post (see kimberlybgeorge.com) that identifies a specific and very common interpersonal power dynamic of patriarchy connected to projection and manipulation. 

What comes into view when we think about feminism as fundamentally a practice of memory work, and one that facilitates healing through re-membering and integrations of all kinds? And what if the next step of this journey is as simple and complex as listening to the wind today? This episode continues the idea that spiritual feminist practices are about all the ways we come to presence and integration.

How we hold our grief and allow our grief to connect us to greater transformation is a very difficult part of the feminist journey. I discuss why I believe grief needs a creative process that can help us access the knowledge within us we have been systematically cut off from knowing—including our knowledge of interconnection with all beings, all life, all wonder.

Educator A.J. Hostak and I discuss his feminist journey as it relates to masculinity, vulnerability, and building coalitions. We talk about how the 10 year gap in our ages is relevant for the cultural change underway, too, as more younger men are ready to join feminist labor.

I interviewed educator and teaching artist Joshua Lewis about his journey of engaging feminist learning as a white cis man. We talk about tears, hierarchies of masculinity, and the theft of the self that patriarchy inflicts on little boys.

I dialogue with one of my clients about his journey as a white man learning to engage in feminist reflection and labor. We talk about vulnerability, why the work is hard, and how it is that feminism is about love and how love is a spiritual practice.

I had an important conversation with Stephanie Drury, trauma specialist and the brilliant host of the forum Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Listen to us talk about abortion, cis men's defense mechanisms, grief, Christian practices vs. Christian theocracy, and where we find our hope amidst the rise of white Christian nationalism.

Part of traumatic experience, as connected to structural violence, is the ways in which our knowledge of the world is gaslight, denied, and minimized. How do we reclaim that knowledge? How does mind-body connection help us access and speak our knowledge?

In the beginning of this series on trauma, we will ask questions like: What is the relationship between patriarchy and refusing our own felt experience of vulnerability? How does patriarchy interrupt our own natural healing mechanisms, such as grief? And what kind of knowledge of the world does traumatic experience help us access?

What happens when defense mechanisms are protecting power and privilege? What are ways through this impasse in our relationships? And why is connecting with our body so important as we move through impasse and grow and change?

How would you describe how spiritual awakening connects to 1) our own capacity to do our true work in the world and 2) our own capacity to help others do their true work in the world? This episode is a 20-minute meditation on these questions, which for me are at the heart of living into our creative life, feminist life, and spiritual life together.